The opportunity to play with so many different motherboards, even within the same brand, really helps objectify modern PC design and how crucial motherboards really are in order to deliver the proper end user experience, and how specific things really need to be when you design one. ASRock's current X299 OC Formula proudly proclaims exactly what it is even in its name, and by doing so sets the bar for what must be attained. Then you have Nick Shih's name plastered right on top, and you know, this guy isn't hard to find. So when you run into some issue and need a BIOS tweak to get where you need to be, you know who to get a hold of. If it's possible, he'll make it happen. This board is ready to take your KabyLake-X or Skylake-X CPU to the limit without question, and if you don't pay attention to what you're doing with it, you just might flip the slow mode switch and not realize it, and should you do all your benchmarks without really paying attention to the results, it'll make you do them all over again.

Benchmarks don't always tell the full story, however. There's a checklist out there somewhere of all the features someone who is really serious about overclocking would want from their motherboard, and the ASRock X299 OC Formula took that list and stopped. Each and every one of those items is here, and all of the other stuff, the stuff that just gets in the way, it was shown the door and told not to come back. For me, personally, that means this is the board you freeze on weekends and then put back on the shelf to dry during the week. It has a distinct purpose, and if you want it to do anything else, you might be disappointed, but then again, you might not be. This is a crazily capable motherboard, and the difference between what is here and what some other boards offer is simply night and day. If you want to overclock Intel's X299, get your wallets out now because this is one board you absolutely cannot miss.

Intel's X299 platform does something AMD has not; it brings a full line-up of CPUs starting with 4 cores and going all the way up to 18 cores to a single socket. This platform really does bring enthusiasts and high-performance computing and gaming together in a single platform that has all the functionality needed to do anything anyone needs right now, and it does it fantastically well too. Having had more than a couple of weeks to play with Intel's new HCC CPUs along with this truly capable motherboard - purpose-built to push the limits in frequency - really helps showcase what's on offer here, and it really isn't possible to see until you get a board like this ASRock X299 OC Formula. If you call yourself an "overclocker", you best ditch those APUs and iGPUs from the mainstream platforms and buy some real toys because you're missing out on all the fun if you don't - and make no mistake, not buying this board if you are interested in this platform would be a grave mistake.