ASRock X99 Extreme6/ac Motherboard Review

[section_title title=”Conclusion”]

Conclusion

A review of a black and blue themed board; who would have thought it in 2015 right?  With red and black being the preferred choice of manufacturers, only a handful still actually produce top end boards in blue and black; ASRock and MSI.  That being said, a motherboard isn’t just defined by its aesthetic or style, the most common factor any component is judged on is performance and ASRock have been at the forefront of that since 2002; the year they formed.  Regardless of their history, people only care about the current so is the ASRock X99 Extreme6/ac all it’s cracked up to be?  That’s break the seal and jump in with both feet…

Figuratively speaking, in fact definitively speaking, the X99 platform is all about performance and the Extreme6/ac really does deliver good all-round performance which for the price range, is exactly what you would want from such a board.  The Extreme6/ac battles against the MSI Gaming 7 well but does lose out a little in gaming; the Gaming 7 is designed idealistically for gaming so that is no surprise whereas the Extreme6/ac is a more designated all-rounder; synthetics only show one half of the story with a solid bundle of features usually attributing to the other half.

The board itself has plenty of USB 3.0 ports so if you are like me and have a multitude of USB powered devices or flash drives, then this board is certainly going to appeal to you.  In addition to this, it features 10 x SATA3 6GB/s so theoretically if you had 10 x 4TB HDD’s, that is 400TB of potential storage to play with; fantastic right?  The board packs as many features onto it as connectivity with useful ones such as the ASRock cloud; this allows for such things which include wireless media streaming across devices in your house and although this is free for the 1^st year, after that it is a paid renewal so bare that in mind.  Other non-incandescent features include such as Purity Sound 2 which provides a better audio experience due to the EMI shielding present on the regular Realtek ALC1150 chip.  Aside from the built in Wi-Fi, I wouldn’t really call the rest of it useful as such as I would expect it to be on any motherboard of this price; for a premium price I would expect premium components and ASRock provides this in spades.

Looking to the design of the board, with a 12 power phase (digital) design, this has plenty of headroom for overclocking but be wary, cooling performance and silicone lottery play a much bigger part on boards like this and unlike the MSI X99S Gaming 7, this board failed to hit 4.7GHz; even with numerous hours spent tweaking and tweaking.  The blue and black is a nice refreshing addition to a red and black filled world, but it goes without saying that blue and black still works well.  The heat sinks look relatively good and I am a fan of the metallic blue sparkle effect when direct light is shone upon them; this can be LED case lighting or from other sources.  Overall the board does feature a very deep black PCB which is a win for me but it just feels like it is missing something aesthetically?  I can’t quite put my finger on it, maybe you can in the comments below?

At £218.88 at Ballicom International, this costs around £20 more than the compared MSI X99S Gaming 7 and although the performance in synthetics and real world scenarios are pretty much even in general, the ASRock offering does have built in Wi-Fi which does add to the appeal; one could argue that a Wi-Fi compatible USB stick would do the job for less, but will it be as good as the inclusive ASRock one?  Well I doubt that very much and the price is still a fair one all things considered especially for what the X99 platform is all about; performance, performance and oh, more performance!

With a 6 or 8 core CPU, you need a capable motherboard and that is exactly what the ASRock X99 Extreme6/ac is; it might not be as golden as some on the market but it is an all-round jack of all trades board which offers users to have a black and blue option without modding.  If I could give a motherboard a half silver, half gold award then I would but then where would it end for the future?  This is a great board, no mistake about it but with the sneaky ASRock Apps which need to be bought, the subscription after 1 year on the ASRock cloud, I have decided to go with Silver today.  The performance is there but it could be better and in the future, I think we will need to see some of the more specific OC or Gaming boards to see how they compare against each other!

Looking for a black and blue (not white and gold #getit?) motherboard which doesn’t scrimp on quality or performance and want built in W-Fi capability?  Then the ASRock X99 Extreme6/ac should be near the top, if not top of your list!

Huge thanks to ASRock for sending the X99 Extreme6/ac motherboard in for review.