The ASRock Z87 Extreme6/ac was, fundamentally, rather boring. It worked fine but wasn't anything special, other than for the huge amount of connectivity it features at a decent price. However, I also found it to be underperforming while drawing a bit too much power for the low performance. That performance was weirdly low in a clearly explainable way, but the actual cause, well, might remain a mystery, although it might be as simple as that Turbo Optimization switch being disabled in the default BIOS configuration. I have asked OEMs to disable their custom Turbo profiles at default, but it really didn't work out the way I thought it would here; that is, if it is the cause of this particular issue.

Ignoring all that which can quickly be remedied, the connectivity offered by the ASRock Z87 Extreme6/ac is pretty awesome as it includes 10 SATA 6Gb/s ports in total, WiFi that supports Intel WiDi wireless video, and an HDMI-in port for potential video from a discrete graphics card over Intel's WiDi. There are enough options to get an overclock, making the power consumption issue I ran into rather unfortunate, but it might simply be due to my CPU dying, as I have had several die on me already (although those were totally my fault).

Honestly, I don't want to fault ASRock for the problems I encountered, and I really should have sent them an email asking about what is up here before posting this review. However, if this turns out to be a problem with my own hardware, as can happen from time to time with new platforms, relating these experiences exactly as they happened does serve a purpose, and it wasn't a good experience to have. I have also come across other users on various forums complaining of similar issues, although not all of them were using the ASRock Z87 Extreme6/ac. I've scored the ASRock Z87 Extreme6/ac pretty low because of the problems I encountered, and that's that. ASRock's rep is likely to contact me should this be an unexpected issue, and I might have to update this review to reflect what they have to say. Hopefully, they will at least have something to say, even if it is just to tell me I'm a noob.