Introduction

The X58 Extreme3 motherboard from ASRock is an updated version of the older X58 Extreme; it features many enhancements like USB 3.0, eSATA3, SATA3, better cooling on the 8-phase VRM and updated retention mechanism for the PCI Express slots. We compare its performance to four other X58 motherboards in this review.



At first I would like to thank ASRock for making this review possible of their X58 Extreme3 Motherboard.




About ASRock:

“ ASRock Inc., established in 2002, target at entry to mainstream segment MB business, is an energetic company with the combination of technology and humanity. Devoting efforts to bring customers the innovative and reliable motherboards with the design concept of 3C, ""Creative, Considerate, Cost-effective"", ASRock has successfully established a well-known leading brand of the best price-performance motherboard in the industry. ASRock products' high recognition stems from company’s devotion to bring the most cost-performance products to users.

Besides creative features and solid products, ASRock engineers also pay special attention to EMI, thermal, acoustics and details to achieve complete customer satisfaction. In addition to price-performance, creative and considerate features, ASRock also pay special on the issue of eco-environmental protection with the release of ROHS products and energy saving functions to save the environment.

To succeed in this ultra-competitive industry, ASRock provides great products with speed-to-market, cost and service to customers.

Facing the constantly changing technologies of motherboard, ASRock will always keep the vision of the future and develop future-proof products upon our 3C design concept to our customers.

It is the commitment to our customers and products, like the spirit presented in our maxim:

"Motherboard, We Master It!”

Packaging:

The X58 Extreme3 motherboard from ASRock can be found in a big cardboard box to protect it and the bulk inside; on the frontal part we can see the ASRock logo, a large coin-like logo which describes the highlights of the board (USB 3.0, SATA3 and eSATA3), the full name of the product and some icon that tell us of the supported technologies and included software; in the bottom left corner we can also see an icon which tells us that the board is fully compatible with the Gulftown CPUs from Intel:



On the back of the box, we can see most of the product features explained with graphics and text, along with the specifications in the bottom right corner; most of the motherboard components are described in the top part:



The interior of the box is dual layered, meaning that on the top part we can see the bundle along with the documentation and installation CD and on the bottom part we can find the motherboard itself:



As bulk, we can find:

a disk with drivers, applications and documentation

the user manual

4 SATA cables

2 power SATA to Molex adapters

one IDE and one floppy cable

a SLI bridge

the motherboard I/O shield



The user manual fully explains how to set up the system from installing the CPU to BIOS configuration and so on:



The board came protected in an anti-static bag but also wrapped in a foam material, to avoid damages during transport:



After getting the board out, we can see that it does have a nice blue/white/black theme and not many mixed colors like in the previous version; a preinstalled fan can be found on the new VRM heatsink and we can see lots of space between PCI Express slots, so we can install dual-slot video cards without the danger of overheating:



The Nuvoton NCT6771F is a Super I/O chip which can be found on the bottom left part of the PCB:



Audio on this board is provided by a VIA VT2020 10-Channel Hi Def Audio CODEC:



The Realtek RTL8111DL Gigabit Ethernet controller takes care of the Gigabit LAN on the board:



The USB 3.0 interface is provided by the well-known NEC D720200F1 controller which can be found in many other devices:



From left to right, on the bottom of the PCB we can find a IR header, a HDMI_SPDIF header, one Floppy header (wondering why some manufacturers still support it), a COM and TPM header, along with a fan and Firewire header:



On the right side, a USB 2.0 header can be found, along with the power LED and Speaker header; the RESET and POWER buttons are very useful when testing the board, before getting it inside a case and the LED display shows us the post codes to identify the errors when they occur:

The VIA Fire IIM VT6308S 1394 Host Controller takes care of the Firewire interface:



Near the center of the board, we can find the Marvell 88SE9128 SATA 6GBps Controller:



The two SATA3 connectors are also located near the controller:



The Southbridge is covered by an interesting looking heatsink with the ASRock logo on top:



On the right side of the PCB, we can find 6 SATA ports and an IDE header; near the IDE header we can also find the clear CMOS jumper along with the battery:



Near the memory slots, we can find another USB 2.0 header and the front panel header:



The memory slots are near the ATX 24-pin power connector and are color coded differently; if we do have only 3 sticks of ram, the right way to plug them is in the white slots; if they would be installed in the blue ones, the system won’t boot:



On the upper part of the PCB, we can find two more fan headers along with the inscription that this motherboard is Gulftown CPU ready:



In the top left corner, the ATX 12V 8-pin connector can be found, along with the PS2_USB power jumper and the CPU fan header:



The 8-phase VRM does have a revised cooling system compared to the older revision and this time features active cooling:



The VRM cooler connects to the chipset heatsink with a single heatpipe:



The X58 chipset cooler looks the same like the one from the X58 Extreme, only colored differently. During load, it gets pretty hot:



From left to right, we can find the following I/O panel ports:

PS/2 mouse and keyboard port

a CLEAR CMOS button (very useful in case the system does have a failed overclock and we do not want to open up the case to reset it by jumper)

an optical/coaxial SPDIF out port

a USB 2.0 port along with a powered eSATAIII/USB 2.0 combo port

4 more USB 2.0 ports

a Firewire port

two USB 3.0 ports along with the LAN RJ-45 port

the audio ports



After installing the CPU cooler (in this case a Cogage True Spirit), we can see that there is plenty of space between the fan and the first memory slot, so even tall memory modules would fit:

The board BIOS

The POST screen shows us the full name of the motherboard along with the BIOS version installed on top; also here we can see the name of the CPU and its current running speed, the memory operating mode and its total quantity, but also information regarding the installed drives:



The BIOS is divided into various menus like Main, OC Tweaker, Advanced and so on; in the Main menu, we can see and set the system date/time, but also get information regarding the installed CPU and memory:



In the OC Tweaker menu, we can adjust the speed of the system by overclocking or underclocking it(in case we want to save power and we consider the system delivers more performance than we would really need); we can set each option manually or we can opt for enabling some preloaded profiles:



In the second part of the OC Tweaker menu, we can see the rest of the adjustable voltages, but also the three slots in which we can save our BIOS settings:



In the Advanced Settings menu, we can find some options related to the CPU configuration, Chipset configuration, Storage and so on:



In the CPU Configuration sub-menu, we can see detailed information regarding the installed CPU, and we can enable/disable options like Hyperthreading, Virtualization, SpeedStep, Turbo:



In the Chipset Settings sub-menu, we can set the Primary Graphics adapter, enable/disable the onboard audio or enable/disable the Good Night LED option:



In the same screen, we can select what application we have decided to install (the full version of the THX TruStudio PRO or the trial version of the X-Fi MB):



In the Storage Configuration sub-menu, we can enable/disable the SATAII and SATA3 controllers; here we can also configure the drives, depending on which port they are installed:



In the USB configuration sub-menu, the USB controllers can be enabled or disabled (including the USB 3.0 one):



In the H/W Monitor screen, we can see the current temperatures for the motherboard and CPU, the speeds of the installed fans and the voltages:



Each fan can be adjusted manually, or left on auto setting:



In the Boot menu, we can set various boot settings configurations or set the priority of the boot devices:



In the Boot Settings Configuration sub-menu, the full screen logo can be enabled or disabled (it can be left on auto so on each boot sequence it will change or can be chosen a specific one). Also in this menu we can select to boot from onboard LAN or enable Numlock on boot:



In the Security tab, we can set a supervisor password, but also a user password:



Finally, in the Exit tab we can choose to save or discard the changes and exit; here we also have an option to load some preset defaults:

Test Setup

Stefan's Test Setup
CPU	Core i7 920 @ 3.2GHz& 4GHz
Cooling	Cogage True Spirit
Mainboard	Asrock X58 Extreme
Memory	G.Skill F3-12800CL8T-6GBPI PI Series
VGA	AXLE GeForce 210 512MB DDR2 ATI RADEON HD 4890 1GB
Other	Power Supply : Antec True Power New 750W HDD : Seagate Barracuda 320GB 7200.10 Case : Cooler Master HAF922 Case with 2 NB-Multiframe S-Series MF12-S3HS@1800RPM on the side

I had no issues getting to 4GHz with this board:



Here is also the CPU-Z validation, along with the link:



To extract more detailed information about the motherboard, I have used the Everest Ultimate Edition utility:





The ASRock board comes with the IES application, which, when turned on, shows us the saved energy in a specific period of time, the CPU frequency along with its voltage and the number of phases in use at the time:



Another application from ASRock is the OC Tuner, which we can use to monitor the temperature, fan speeds or modify the fans RPM; we can use it to do also overclocking on-the-fly or control the voltages:



The OC DNA application can be used to save our BIOS setting in a file and share it with our friends with the help of the internet or other storage media:



The VIA audio codec drivers have a nice visual interface and we can see what we have connected in the audio ports and which ports are free:



The audio interface can open even further and we can adjust the volume on all channels, set the number of speakers, adjust the sample rate and the bit depth, adjust the EQ, add some effects and so on:



The VIA drivers on the ASRock website offer full support for the THX TruStudio Pro application from Creative; this application, after it is installed, will ask for activation but the serial is already provided, so we will get a very useful application free of charge.
The THX TruStudio Pro application permits us to enhance the sound output and the options are very much alike the WoW headphones I have reviewed in the past from Creative. The activated effects are lit orange and the deactivated ones are greyed out:



When an option is selected, the interface will change a little, permitting us to adjust it:

3Dmarks

The Extreme3 from ASRock is quite the champ at these Futuremark benches as you'll see in the charts. At stock and overclocked speeds it is able to run with the best out there, sometimes finishing first!











Does it perform equally good with synthetic benchmarks? Let's find out

Synthetic Benchmarks

The PCMark series from Futuremark is a system wide benchmark which measures performance of CPU, GPU, memory as well as storage.



Under x64 at stock speeds the ASRock Xtreme3 trails the competitions a bit, in all other settings the performance is on par with the other test subjects.

Furmark is an OpenGL benchmark and GPU load test application, we shouldn't see much difference here, but never assume:



This test was repeated several times with the same outcome every time, the ASRock boards are a few percentage slower than the competition, no matter what resolution is tested, or if the CPU is overclocked.

CrystalMark is under complete system benchmark tool, here the Xtreme3 shines nicely:



Cinebench is all about raw CPU power as well as multihreaded performance, measuring the time it took to render the 3D scene here are the results:



Commendable performance by the ASRock Xtreme3 here.

The last bench of this bunch is an old classic, SuperPI is a very good raw measurement tool to see how well a system is tuned "out of the box" as each small change in memory timing, FSB speed, ratio etc effects performance noticeably:



ASRock BIOS engineers did their homework here, besting the other motherboards tested at stock as well as overclocked CPU speed;

Game benchmarks

We tested 8 different games with these motherboards, as expected the differences between them are minor, but they're there.

Conclusive thoughts

The X58 Extreme3 from ASRock is a nice improvement over the last generation. The board looks much better having a black/white/blue color scheme and the cooling got improved on the VRM(newly designed heatsink with fins and active cooling). The VRM cooler is linked with the chipset heatsink with one heatpipe, which gets pretty hot during load.

Thanks to the new cooling system, there were no stability problems when running the CPU at 4GHz for a long time; on the previous X58 Extreme, I was sometimes getting system shutdowns, because of the excessive heat on the VRM and X58 chipset.

Another useful feature is the extra holes for older LGA775 coolers or water blocks, so if we decide to keep and use the old cooling system, we can without any problems.

The PCI Express slot retention mechanism has also been improved compared to the X58 Extreme.

The THX TrueStudio Pro application from Creative is a nice addition in the bundle and offered free of charge (registered version). On the installation disk we can also find the X-FI MB application, but this one is offered only as trial and it is functional only for 30 days.

The integrated USB 3.0, SATA3 (6GBps) and eSATA3 make this board future proof and it is much better to have the chips integrated instead of installing expansion cards which could take up important space in the case.

Price wise this board makes for an affordable USB 3/SATA 600 enabled motherboard, at around $200, which is $30-50 more than the original X58 Xtreme.



I would like to thank ASRock making this review possible.