The Board - Layout

Stuffed to the gills with features and functionality, the ASRock Z77 Extreme11 appears as a busy mess of black, gold, and white, with thick, dashing lines of silver accents on its coolers. The rear of the board is just as busy as the front, with many surface-mounted components all over the place.


The area around the socket is amazingly clear of components. Only a couple capacitors mar the clean surface that surrounds the socket. Flipping the board over, the back of the socket is ready to accept nearly any aftermarket backplate, with plenty of clearance.


The ASRock Z77 Extreme11 forgoes any legacy slot support, sporting four PCIe x16 slots and a triplet of PCIe x1 slots. The DIMM slots have those clip-less ends on one side that I don't really like, but these are of a newer design I haven't seen very often, and it does seem to provide a more secure system than some of the other clip-less slots I've seen. Like other boards, they support DIMMs of up to 8 GB in density, which brings total RAM support up to 32 GB.


The pin headers found on the lower edge match what we've seen on many ASRock products in the past, but the ASRock Z77 Extreme11 diverges from the norm a fair bit with quite a few fan headers as well as a full USB port and some buttons there. Speaking of fan headers, the ASRock Z77 Extreme11 has seven fan headers in total. Most of them can be controlled independently from within the BIOS.


The rear I/O plate has a ton of USB 3.0 ports, eight in total, as well as a couple of USB 2.0 ports for legacy USB devices. There are Firewire, eSATA, dual LAN, and audio ports here as well, and a combo keyboard/mouse PS/2 port to nearly cover every device. There's only a single HDMI port for video output, but being the level of a board this is, that's definitely more than enough, although I would have preferred a DisplayPort plug instead. That brings us to the 14 internal SATA ports found on the board's right edge, something that definitely sets this board apart from others. The top six ports are run by the Intel Z77 Express chips, while the lower eight are controlled by an external LSI SAS chipset.