ASRock Z97 Extreme4 Motherboard Review

[section_title title=”Introduction”]Introduction

• Brand: ASRock
• Model: Z97 Extreme4
• Price: £99.16 (at time of review)

ASRock is a world renowned manufacturer and of consumer, workstation, server and HTPC motherboards. When they split from ASUS in 2002 their main goal was to compete with companies such as Foxconn in the commodity OEM Market. After about 5 years ASRock decided it was time to move the company up the ranks a bit and also started focusing on the DIY sector. They also expanded into the industrial and server markets in 2012.

ASRock has distributors in at least 90 countries and is the world’s third largest motherboard manufacturer. Aside from motherboards, ASRock also sell desktop minicomputers in some parts of the world. Year by year ASRock continue to grow and prove their products are that of quality and have shown they are not planning on going anywhere but up the ranks in the future.

Following in the steps of its bigger brother the ASRock Z97 Extreme6 today, we will be taking a look at the Extreme4. While the Extreme4 may not have as many features as the Extreme6 it surely isn’t lacking much and should be right on par performance wise.

The two main features the Extreme4 is missing over its bigger brother are the Ultra M.2 slot and the Mini PCI Express slot, this is fine for me as I do not currently have any supported devices that would utilize these anyway.  The ASRock Extreme4 still offers some amazing features in the way of Purity Sound2, Intel Gigabit Lan, support for 3-Way AMD Crossfire and 4-way NVIDIA SLI while still offering support for dual channel RAM up to 3200MHz+(OC) to name a few. Let’s not forget about the future compatibility to upgrade to a Broadwell CPU once released.

To get things started off let’s have a look at the specifications followed by a closer look at the packaging and motherboard itself.