# ASRock X79 Extreme11 Intel LGA 2011



## cadaveca (Jul 30, 2012)

The ultra-high-end ASRock X79 Extreme11 is fitted with an onboard PCIe 3.0 LSI RAID controller, and not just one, but TWO PLX PEX8747 PCIE 3.0 switches. The ASRock X79 Extreme11 really does take it to the Extreme, offering functionality and capabilities no other motherboard can claim. But does it perform to the Extreme?

*Show full review*


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## Delta6326 (Aug 31, 2012)

Great review!
This board rocks!

Cadaveca i'm looking at getting the ASRock X79 Extreme6 Do you think it would be a good board as well? Plan on 64GB ram for a 56GB ramdisk...


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## GSquadron (Aug 31, 2012)

At that price i have bought a whole PC


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## Sasqui (Aug 31, 2012)

> •High price, although I personally feel the price is justified. Unfortunately, not all users need 14 SATA ports and a built-in RAID card.



No kidding, particularly someone who's also an overclocking enthusiast, kind of narrows the feild a little.  I also couldn't beleive all of the I/O connectors.

The performance (with exception of SATA) was rather amazing.

Thanks for yet another great review.


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## cadaveca (Aug 31, 2012)

Delta6326 said:


> Great review!
> This board rocks!
> 
> Cadaveca i'm looking at getting the ASRock X79 Extreme6 Do you think it would be a good board as well? Plan on 64GB ram for a 56GB ramdisk...



I'm sorry, but without having tested teh board myself, I cannot give any opinion. SHould it be good? YES. IS it really, and is the BIOS nicely optimized like this one? I cannot be sure at this time.




Aleksander Dishnica said:


> At that price i have bought a whole PC




Sure. Many people would. This isn't meant for those people..it's strictly for high-end multi GPU users that like RAID as well...high-end workstation-like people. unfortunately for me, I am one of those people. Here's my "office":






With all that hardware laying around, clearlyfor me personally, A $600 board is no big deal. Heck, the 2 3960X chips I have retial for like $2500. My gaming system, new, would cost about $6000.


My wife, on the otherhand, uses a Dell laptop from 4 years ago, that cost $500 back then. There are many differnt users, with many different needs. Personally, I'm glad we even have such expensive choices!


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## popswala (Aug 31, 2012)

The one thing that stand out to me is the amount of sata ports. Really nice seeing more then the usual 4-6. With 2 cd drives and a few hdd's your boards already tapped. Really sweet option here. Kinda wish they went with the sata power for gpu lanes instead of molex. Much easier to work with then molex as the pins are kinda funky. 

Great review as always.

Loving your brick wall in your man cave..


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## radrok (Aug 31, 2012)

cadaveca said:


> Here's my "office":



You mean Man Cave, right?



Great review, as always


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## Breit (Aug 31, 2012)

at first: thanks for the review, i enjoyed reading it. 

the price-tag of $600 is not a problem considering that a decent sas-cotroller with 8 ports can cost $600 alone. the question is: is it any good? if you have to disable it and use a separate raid-card because of bad performance (or high temp on the combined cooler), than maybe it is a bit to high... 

although this is an enthusiast platform an since when do enthusiasts really care for the price their components cost? i mean discussing +/- $100 on a board while spending $1000 on the cpu (3960x) without considering the justification doesn't seem right, does it?

what i don't get is the thing you said about watercooling? to me it seems the only valid option if one plans to use that board in anything other than a benchmark session. all it needs is a custom water block?! i believe that if this board is any good and gains acceptance in the enthusiast community, there will be a manufacturer who builds a block for this board as there is a custom block for nearly all competing boards.

with that being said, it would have been nice to see how it fares against the other top-tier x79 boards, like the asus rampage iv extreme or the evga x79 classified/ftw for instance.


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## cadaveca (Aug 31, 2012)

Breit said:


> asus rampage iv extreme or the evga x79 classified/ftw for instance.



I'd love to try those boards out, but those board makers neglected to send me samples. I do not currently have any sort of working relationship with EVGA, and not for a lack of trying, but perhaps soon I'll be able to add them to the list of manufacturers I work with now. Hopefulyl ASUS will continue to send me ROG products from this ponit forward, but last year I did purposely ask that they did not, and that they send me "regular" products, as they were more common. AS you can see by teh ASUS boards I have reviewed recently, getting ROG products is not an issue at this point, so maybe in the future  Iwil lahve numbers that compare similar products to this one. I just might have a similar board for next week, even!  


ASRock does have a couple of screenshots of the LSI RAID working with 8 drives, on the website for the board, which can be found here:

http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/X79 Extreme11/

I cannot confirm those numbers at this point, as I do not have eight SSDs to test with, nor eight mechanical drives. I will be purchasing more drives at the end of September, and do paln on re-visiting drive technologies, including Thunderbolt, so perhaps I can examine the LSI controller then.

I must say, since the rest of the board did perform fiarly well, and the "poor" drive performance isn't really noticed in daily tasks, that I do feel confident that the LSI controller will work well.


As to the watercooling...to me, watercooling is best used to eliminate noise, if you are not overclocking, and even when overclocking, total fan noise can be reduced greatly. Unfortunately, as you said, it would require an OEM make a custom bloack for this board, which I do not think is very likely, so the noise must be dealt with. IT can be managed with the BIOS controls, as I mentioned, so it's not overly bad, but out of the box, it really did hurt my ears.


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## dj-electric (Aug 31, 2012)

Dave, living in a cave

da bum ts!


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## Sasqui (Aug 31, 2012)

cadaveca said:


> I must say, since the rest of the board did perform fiarly well, and the "poor" drive performance isn't really noticed in daily tasks, that I do feel confident that the LSI controller will work well.



Yea, "poor" is only relative to the other boards. In reality, it doesn't suck.


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## Crap Daddy (Aug 31, 2012)

radrok said:


> You mean Man Cave, right?



It's more like Dave Cave.

Back on topic, it's interesting how ASRock delivers a Mercedes when they where known not long ago to produce Volkswagen for the masses. But considering some will populate all those slots with high-end GPUs, SSDs and ridiculous amounts of RAM, 600$ is not really such a big deal. And furthermore, the performance is there.


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## Major_A (Aug 31, 2012)

Who buys this?  It's so damn expensive I don't know what kind of person picks this up (stupid or stupid with money).


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## cadaveca (Aug 31, 2012)

Major_A said:


> Who buys this?  It's so damn expensive I don't know what kind of person picks this up (stupid or stupid with money).



I'd buy it.

And, BTW, people with money to afford stuff like this, typically got that money because of a lack of stupidity, not an overabundance of stupidity.

Usually stupid people sit and bitch about not having money, instaed of going and getting the thing they desire so much.


Me, I'm broke. However, if i want something, like fancy hardfware, I work for it...like by doing reviews. A RAID card, and it's cost, easily makes the cost of this board seem like nothing. NOw, I can have a RAID card, and  high-performance board, and it cost me a week of 6-hour days doing this review.


IF you can't make $600 in a week, you need to find a new job. $600 barely feeds me and my 4 kids for a week. Not everyone lives in the same economic conditions.


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## buggalugs (Aug 31, 2012)

Shame about the fan.


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## BigMack70 (Aug 31, 2012)

Well if you're gonna shell out $1k for a CPU, why not $600 for a motherboard?

Heck, I spent almost $300 on my motherboard for a $300 CPU, so technically this would be a relatively better deal for someone picking up a 3960X.


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## cadaveca (Sep 1, 2012)

buggalugs said:


> Shame about the fan.



That's about how I feel. But they really couldn't do much about it.

These PLX PEX8747 chips run quite hot. With 48 lanes of PCIe 3.0 going through each of them(or 96 total), plus the chipset, plus the RAID card, that fact they stuffed it all in there and it stays stable is a feat in itself by all rights.

THe 24-phase VRM goes a long way towards that though. On the other X79 boards I've palyed with so far, the VRM generates all the heat, and it's fair bit when overclocked, especially considering that the CPU can easily consume 250 W. WIth this board, the VRM gets heated by the other part of the cooler, and the load being spread out over all those phases makes that no big deal. 24 phases @ 250 W, means that eahc phases is pushing a wee bit over 10 watts...

That helps keep it efficient, too.


There are quite a few products out there with silly amount of power phases, but this board really helps show how that can truly be useful, and that is a lesson that is invaluable. $600 really is a small price to pay.


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## MxPhenom 216 (Sep 1, 2012)

cadaveca said:


> I'm sorry, but without having tested teh board myself, I cannot give any opinion. SHould it be good? YES. IS it really, and is the BIOS nicely optimized like this one? I cannot be sure at this time.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Your a cave man!


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## erixx (Sep 1, 2012)

The Asus Striker boards (nforce chipset) were also extremely hot and some waterblocks were on the market. For those that did not mount waterblocks there were all kind of "rat" solutions fitting tiny fans, "air ducts", giant passive headsinks everywhere... to cool the damn chipset.


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## Yukikaze (Sep 1, 2012)

cadaveca said:


> And, BTW, people with money to afford stuff like this, typically got that money because of a lack of stupidity, not an overabundance of stupidity.



This.


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## Sasqui (Sep 1, 2012)

Dave, I have rather simple a question about the 77 vs. 79 chipset.

What is the reason for the superior performance of the 79 chipset?  In the past, different intel chipsets supporting the same CPU and memory typically didn't have much performance difference, it was usually just more/less features.


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## cadaveca (Sep 1, 2012)

Sasqui said:


> Dave, I have rather simple a question about the 77 vs. 79 chipset.
> 
> What is the reason for the superior performance of the 79 chipset?  In the past, different intel chipsets supporting the same CPU and memory typically didn't have much performance difference, it was usually just more/less features.



Honestly, both chipset are quite similar, and the major differences are actually contained in the CPU, both by additional cache, additional cores, and additional bandwidth, both the PCIe devices, and system memory.

The differences aren't truly beneficial to everyone, but there are tangible differences if your computing needs require a lot of processing power.

Most X79 boards don't take full advantage of all the features that X79 offers. The platform itself was quite crippled on release..should have been SAS on all chips, and 8-core CPUs.


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## cadaveca (Sep 1, 2012)

MJA said:


> each powerful video card has its own 6 pin or 8 pin power connector. so whats the point about molex power connectors on some boards like this board. how should i know that i need to connect psu molex cable to these molex power connectors or not?



All cards draw power via PCIe slot as well. Most high-end VGAs, this is 75 W. when you add more than two high-end VGAs, the chances that your PSU's 24-pin plug cannot properly handle the PCIe power draw increases, so there are power plugs there to provide that additional power, and spread the load out.


You'll find that most boards now, with 3 slots or more, that are designed for gamers or overclocking, will have these additional power plugs. I think the past 4-5 Z77 boards I've reviewed have had them, even, and those boards support just 3 cards.


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## Aquinus (Sep 2, 2012)

I would have liked to see the SAS performance on the embedded LSI controller. It's basically a beefy workstation board without using server grade memory and CPU.


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## cadaveca (Sep 2, 2012)

Aquinus said:


> I would have liked to see the SAS performance on the embedded LSI controller. It's basically a beefy workstation board without using server grade memory and CPU.



I'd love to toss up some numbers. Got $850 for drives and shipping to my door?

Like really, send me some drives, or money to buy new SATA 6 Gb/s SSDs, and I'd be glad to add RAID testing to all my reviews.


I have tried to get some supporting hardware for testing stuff like this, and slowly, I get stuff added. Right now I'm a bit more ocncenred with adding Thunderbolt though. A simple dock is a couple hundred bucks, even, but I'll probably buy one.


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## mjkmike (Sep 3, 2012)

Thanks again Dave.  Next time I win I'm going to fix that cave and get you a good test bench.


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## manofthem (Sep 3, 2012)

Good job Dave, as always. Your board reviews are always highly respected, and as such I've been watching closely your x79 boards to help determine my upgrade path. But regardless, thanks for the super job, well done. Yeah, it's out d my price range, but it's an awesome board!!!


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## TheMailMan78 (Sep 4, 2012)

600 bones?! Thats a spicy meat ball!


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## TRWOV (Sep 4, 2012)

I don't understand this product well: the features are like those of workstation boards but then you have all that bling and non-ECC RAM...


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## Breit (Sep 4, 2012)

Aquinus said:


> I would have liked to see the SAS performance on the embedded LSI controller. It's basically a beefy workstation board without using server grade memory and CPU.



There is a review about this board on AnandTech: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6228/...iew-pcie-30-x16x16x16x16-and-lsi-8way-sassata

It says the LSI controller DOES NOT SUPPORT RAID-5/RAID-6, only 0, 1 and 10, which is a shame to be honest. Performance is excellent though, but I doubt is usefulness...

They also said that this board supports some XEON CPUs and along with these CPUs, the board supports ECC memory.


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## Aquinus (Sep 4, 2012)

Breit said:


> DOES NOT SUPPORT RAID-5/RAID-6



That's incredibly lame, because the X79 ERST does at least support RAID-5.   That's kind of disappointing to be honest, not to say that it doesn't look like a beautiful motherboard. Just when I thought my 16 + 2 + 2 VRMs were a lot.


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## cadaveca (Sep 4, 2012)

TRWOV said:


> I don't understand this product well: the features are like those of workstation boards but then you have all that bling and non-ECC RAM...





> Supports DDR3 ECC, un-buffered memory with Intel® Workstation 1S Xeon processors E5 16xx/26xx/46xx series in socket LGA 2011




Memory controller is in the CPU, so memory support is CPU-dependant.


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## m&m's (Sep 6, 2012)

Nice review, but I'm wondering if the Ready Boost option in AXTU really do something, have you tried it? Is it enabled by default? Does giving 1 or 2GB change something? What I want to know is if it is interesting to have like 16GB of ram and set 8GB on Ready Boost to accelerate an hard drive, but I doubt it.


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## cadaveca (Sep 6, 2012)

Should work fine, but I'm not sure about 8 GB.


 If not, you can always make a ramdisk with AXTU, too.


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## Aquinus (Sep 6, 2012)

I wonder how the SSD would fare on the LSI controller by itself. If the LSI controller is using PCI-E 3.0, that means it's bypassing DMI and the X79 chipset, right? I would love to see how they compare.


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## TRWOV (Sep 6, 2012)

cadaveca said:


> Memory controller is in the CPU, so memory support is CPU-dependant.




woops  yeah, you're right


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## m&m's (Sep 7, 2012)

cadaveca said:


> Should work fine, but I'm not sure about 8 GB.
> 
> 
> If not, you can always make a ramdisk with AXTU, too.



Yeah I know about Ramdisk, I just wanted to know if the ready boost thing really accelerate an hard drive or if it's a marketing thing.


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## cadaveca (Sep 7, 2012)

It just creates a ramdisk for the pagefile...so...how often do the apps you use use the pagefile? FOr some users, this will be useful, especially considering ram amounts that are commonly purchased. For others, say a gamer with 16 GB or greater kit, it would be better to create ramdisk and isntall your favorite game to it, I think. This is a $600 board, and I expect users to use 32 GB-64 GB with it.


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## m&m's (Sep 7, 2012)

What is the point of creating a ramdisk for the pagefile, I mean pagefile.sys is used when there is not enough ram, so why removing RAM for pagefile? Isn't it a contradiction?

The Ramdisk solution is very interesting, but what does it do that ImDisk doesn't (witch is free)?

Sorry if I'm forgetting something about pagefile that makes the contradiction...


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## cadaveca (Sep 7, 2012)

m&m's said:


> What is the point of creating a ramdisk for the pagefile, I mean pagefile.sys is used when there is not enough ram, so why removing RAM for pagefile? Isn't it a contradiction?
> 
> The Ramdisk solution is very interesting, but what does it do that ImDisk doesn't (witch is free)?
> 
> Sorry if I'm forgetting something about pagefile that makes the contradiction...



Not everyone will use large amounts of ram, and the ReadyBoost and ramdisk functionality are what ASRock includes with ALL of their motherboards.

I understand ImDisk is free, but so is the ramdrive software ASRock provides...it's actually part of AXTU, even. ASRock offers several different ways to utilize a Ramdisk, as all implementations are not for all users.

For me, ramdisk is useful. with 32 GB installed, windows idles with 4 GB used, leaving me with 28 GB. I leave 8 GB for apps I might have open, and the remaining 20 GB can be used as a ramdisk, which I might install a game to, or set up as swap file for Photoshop.

So no, It is not jsut marketing. Everything that forms the base of ASRock's "555" Acceleration truly does offer real-world performance benefits, and for that reason alone I give ASRock a bit of credit when it comes to the software they provide.

Many other board makers include software tools that are just as useless. You won't find those softwares in my reviews.


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## m&m's (Sep 7, 2012)

I think I expressed myself the wrong way, I'll try to explain my question the best I can. (Sorry, English is not my first language).

I personally also like the software that ASRock provides, the XFAST USB is effective, the XFast Lan is also interesting for people with a lower internet connection grade and the XFast Ram is also a very good feature (since LGA2011 with their 8 slots).







In this picture, I see that there is a Ready Boost option, that's after that I've seen this that these questions came through my mind, does the Ready Boost option is really effective? If yes, does setting like 1GB over 230MB could change something?


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## cadaveca (Sep 7, 2012)

Ok, so what I mean to say is that yes, you may see some gains, but whether you do or not depends on how you use your PC.


For example, if you ask 99.9% of people, they will say PCIe 3.0 doesn't matter. To me, it does. Yet, I'm stuffing three and four cards into my system, when those 99.9% run one card.

So, give it a try, and report back...you may benefit, but you may not.


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## DocMIPS (Oct 1, 2012)

good news for all who cried for a watercooling solution for this amazing board, mips has designed a mosfetblock and a quadchipblock for sb, plx-chips and the lsi raid controller. look at our hp for more details or send pm or mail, thnx.


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## brandonwh64 (Oct 1, 2012)

Dave is the best reviewer out there!


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## ChaoticG8R (Oct 14, 2012)




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## Delta6326 (Oct 15, 2012)

ChaoticG8R said:


> http://www.mips-computer.de/images/mb7611.jpg
> http://i590.photobucket.com/albums/ss343/nateman_doo/ASROCK X79/2012-09-25_21-22-38_472.jpg




Awesome!!

Whos water blocks?


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## radrok (Oct 15, 2012)

One is from Mips Germany (the uppermost pic) and the other one is from Nateman Doo, you can see his works on OCN.


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## ChaoticG8R (Oct 15, 2012)

radrok said:


> One is from Mips Germany (the uppermost pic) and the other one is from Nateman Doo, you can see his works on OCN.



Double correct.  Nateman is slowly finishing his product, and MIPS will be releasing their block US side in the next 2 weeks.


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## Hits9Nine (Oct 19, 2012)

that is one nice motherboard, makes my bigbang xpower2 look like a toy


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