Welcome to Sandy Bridge, with the ASRock P67 Extreme4
by Ian Cutress on January 3, 2011 7:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- ASRock
Final Words
The ASRock P67 Extreme4 shows a lot of potential. With this being our first Sandy Bridge motherboard review, there’s a very fine line of being wowed by Sandy Bridge, and deciding whether this motherboard is something people will want to buy. There will be a lot of choices on offer on release day, and ASRock is obviously competing to be the best board out there.
Our first look at the board is positive. The color scheme isn’t something to be disgusted by, the UEFI is easy to navigate and offers the options you would expect. The PCIe slots are ideally spaced, and the ability to use either 1155/1156 and 775 coolers is always a plus in my book. The 4.6GHz overclock straight from the UEFI option is also a bonus, as is the USB 3.0 bracket included in the box, which as I mentioned previously, I could easily see it on sale for $15. The USB speed, thanks to XFast, is better than other motherboards, and the 2D performance is quite good as well.
On the negative side, you could consider ASRock’s idea to put the default BCLK at 100.4MHz, as it means other vendors will do similar or push even higher. We'd like to see stock clocks be exactly that, and a 0.4% boost while small is sometimes enough to put your board slightly higher on benchmark charts. But on the plus side, if that works for the consumer, it results in a slightly faster system. Also a negative is the fan header location, the lack of dual gigabit Ethernet connectors, and that the Instant Boot software failed to work at the 4.6GHz overclock. The warranty for this board is one year in the US (two in Europe, three in China/Asia), with an option to extend to two for a fee. This is a little less than warranties by other manufacturers, such as ASUS which offers three on their main P67 lines.
If ASRock are really able to get this board out for $150, we have a really nice offering here. Compared to a couple of other boards I have tested this week, I'm liking this ASRock board more and more. It looks OK, it performs well, and the box contains that nice USB bracket. A lot of people would be quite happy with this motherboard if it performs as it did on our test bed. We're not ready to crown the champion P67 board just yet, but the ASRock P67 Extreme4 is definitely a contender.
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Mazlov - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
Having read all the SB articles on AT, I must admit that I too feel that this platform is getting a bit more attention than it deserves. I suspect this is because X58 has been around for such a long time, and enthousiasts are eag to get their hands on something new.In reality, SB, although providing us with a very decent performance upgrade, is not all that exciting. IPC does not seem to have improved very much. Much of the improvement seems to be realized by the higher stock clocks and excellent Turbo. Both of which are a direct result of the new 32nm production process.
The thing that realy bothers me though, is that the chipsets look as if it's still 2009. With the exception of sata-600, nothing about the SB platform is particularly modern. No onboard usb3, not a trace of Light Peak (while Apple is rumoured to have it on Macs this year), no pci-e 3.0 (understandable since it has only rercently been finalized). Looks to me as if Intel is indeed hostage of their own time schedule.
To make matters even worse. Intel has taken their market segmentation one step further, by increasing the amount of different chipsets. All with their own limitations.
Now I'm not saying that SB is a bad product. For over ninety percent of consumers it will fit perfectly. Whether it is good enough for us enthousiasts... I doubt it. 2011 will see some interesting new technologies and SB sadly does not seem to support them yet. If you are a hardware enthousiast, unless you are willing to upgrade again at the end of this year, SB is not for you.
mapesdhs - Wednesday, January 5, 2011 - link
Two 8X PCIE is more than sufficient for SLI/CF with the vast majority of games/apps
using anything other than perhaps the highest end GPUs. naturally X58 favours 3-way/4-way CF/SLI, but few games benefit significantly from these modes (to the
extent that the entire additional platforum cost is worthwhile) and some games perform
worse.
Likewise, dual-channel RAM is also plenty, especially since unlike X58 the
P55 platform does not suffer from the 'vanishing' RAM channel problem when overclocking.
However, I do agree that X58 is hardly dead for those who've bought them. Very
few users will really *need* the extra speed offered by SNB CPUs, and all those
with 920/930 CPUs have the 6-core options which will come down in price.
But don't claim that dual 16X PCIE and 3-channel RAM is essential for high
performance because that's just plain wrong. With the help of a friend who has
an i7 930 system with two GTX 460 SLI, I've accumulated a plethora of benchmark
results which show what I mean (my system is an i7 870 @ 4270MHz, dual EVGA
GTX 460 1GB FTW SLI). Google for "3DMark06 Benchmark SGI Depot", see the
end of the page for the URLs of the other _nine_ pages of performance results,
more added daily/weekly when I & my friend are able.
QED.
Ian.
jp9700 - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
I just wanted to thank you for including your "3D Movement" benchmark. I do a fair amount of computational chemistry myself (although generally quantum mechanics), and I find it incredibly hard to find applicable benchmarks on new hardware.jimhsu - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
Seconded ... most of the scientific community is notoriously conservative when it comes to publishing relevant benchmarks for scientific applications on new hardware. Often, the best you can do is hear from a colleague that "Lab X upgraded to Y and got good results" or "Dr. A. (who published in Nature, Cell, Science, whatever) has 10K in grant money and bought that, so we should too". On rare cases you might see an anecdotal report on a group's public website that tests a single config against another particular configuration and shows a % improvement ... those are rare though.DesktopMan - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
When are they getting rid of the Realtek hardware? The Realtek audio drivers have given me nothing but trouble for years. Isn't there support for gbit ethernet in the platform as well, but board manufacturers choose not to use them? Remember reading about that last bit but not entirely sure if I remember correctly.wolfman3k5 - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
When something CHEAPER and BETTER will come along. And if you're complaining about Realtek, well, do you remember the old audio codecs that where used in the past before Realtek?dgobe - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
It would be nice to see an i7 920(OC'd) vs an i7 2600K at the same clock speed. Turbo off, just to see how the two architectures compare.wolfman3k5 - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
You won't see that because the idea is to throw out the old and buy new. Line your pockets people, in a couple of days you'll be able to buy shiny new toys at newegg.com. As for everyone else, keep and eye on eBay for tons of cheap used CPUs and Mobos.landerf - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
About the bandwidth (muti 3d test), while clock for clock yes 1155 only beats 1156, at max speed it should pass or match 1366 as 1366 is speed limited. That's why I bought 8 gbs of 2400mhz ram in prep for sandy.GTVic - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
I've seen very little information on UEFI, do some Sandy Bridge motherboards have a BIOS or do they all have UEFI.Also, this motherboard has two PS2 ports and a floppy connector. I have seen several Sandy Bridge motherboards which have no IDE, no floppy, no serial/parallel ports and only one blue/green PS2 port. So this motherboard seems to be catering to people with legacy requirements. I think the need for a floppy connector is overstated.