Finished Looks

The ASRock X299 Extreme4 boots up with a soft blue glow peeking out from under the chipset cooler. With my Swiftech waterblock installed, there is plenty of room around the socket for airflow to help with keeping board temperatures down.


The chipset cooler has a lot of LEDs around it; I count no less than seven visible in the first picture above.


It is worth noting that with a cooler that uses two fans which are plugged into the CPU fan headers, should you have an AIO cooler or something similar to what I have and need to plug your waterpump into the other pump-supporting fan header, you'll have a bit of a wiring problem as the System Fan header that offers the 18W support is just to the left of the chipset cooler. You can see the wire from my BitsPower Leviathan cooler snaking out from under the installed VGA to reach this plug, which isn't going to be possible in all installation scenarios. So, if you plan for a similar configuration as to what you see here, you'll want to give some thought to this problem and either grab yourself an extension lead or mount your pump in a place where the wire can reach; or perhaps use a separate fan hub.

Test System

The ASRock X299 Extreme4 seems to have a boosted default Turbo profile at stock. It's not quite a multi-core enhancement-type of boost, but there is a definite tendency for the board to have the CPU sitting at higher clocks than you would see otherwise, and Turbo 3.0 is disabled by default. This might lead to slightly higher temperatures than you might expect at idle, but have no fear; going into the BIOS and re-enabling that Turbo 3.0 option will have the CPU behaving as it should at stock.