Test System

Initial Setup

Initial boot-up with the ASRock Z87 Extreme6/ac was quick and simple, and installing device drivers off the CD was quick and painless. There's not a lot for me to say here because everything worked exactly as expected, but I noticed that the ASRock Z87 Extreme6/ac, unlike many other products I have tested recently, runs with a normal Turbo profile.

Some boards have custom Turbo profiles that boost performance at "stock" settings, giving the appearance of having more performance than they really do. A boosted Turbo profile becomes available on some products when XMP is enabled or, at other times, through a switch in the BIOS. With the current BIOS, I did not find the ASRock Z87 Extreme6/ac to use such profiling by default. For those users that want the free added performance boost, there is an option under the performance-tuning section in the BIOS. It is very clearly labeled. I personally feel that a coupon for Intel's Performance Tuning Protection Plan should be included in the box to protect against CPU failures if boards do this without giving the end user a way to turn it off, or don't explicitly state doing so. For more information on Intel's Performance Tuning Protection Plan, check their site found HERE.


The ASRock Z87 Extreme6/ac fits inot my Lian-Li testbench pretty well. There was plenty of space all around for everything I had installed, VGAs, memory, and cooler alike.


The right-angled SATA ports make installing drives pretty simple, and I was definitely happy to see that there was more than enough space above the top PCIe x16 slots for the fan over my G.Skill 2666 MHz memory.

Power Consumption

We measure CPU power consumption since one of our first tasks is to truly verify system stability. I isolate the power coming through the 8-pin ATX connector using an in-line meter that provides voltage and current readings, and total wattage passed through. While this may not prove to isolate the CPU power draw in all instances, it does serve as a good indicator of board efficiency and effective VRM design. Total system power consumption is no longer reported as this figure can change depending on what VGA is installed. The sole board-only power measurements possible without physically modifying a motherboard are those taken via the 8-pin CPU connector, making it the only figure of value worth reporting. I use wPrime with eight threads selected in the options, since it provides a consistently high workload throughout the full length of the test and runs long enough for the VRM and CPU to produce a fair bit of heat. Most average workloads will draw far less than this, although distributed computing applications are quite similar. This is not supposed to test stability since I use several other applications to do so, but merely to provide repeatable power draw numbers that anyone can replicate. The meter used is an off-the-shelf Zalman unit that has been on the market for some time. It provides quite similar results in my test environment when compared with a FLUKE 337 clamp meter.


Power consumption with the ASRock Z87 Extreme6/ac was right where I expected it to be with my installed components. Idle power consumption at stock frequencies and when overclocked was quite respectable, and load power consumption was also where I expected it to be, although a bit on the high side of things given the performance.