ASRock X79 Extreme4-M and X79 Extreme4 Review – Sandy Bridge-E meets mATX
by Ian Cutress on December 9, 2011 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- ASRock
- X79
ASRock have released a range of motherboards for X79, and today we have looked at the X79 Extreme4-M, a microATX board with all the Sandy Bridge-E credentials, and its bigger brother, the X79 Extreme4. Along with this, ASRock are also planning on releasing an Extreme3, Extreme7, and an ultimate version Extreme9, all at various price points.
It is good to see a microATX board on the X79 market, despite the host of problems that it presents – the premium of space, the ability to use (and abuse) all the additional benefits X79 to offer, and the potential of making the board a lot cheaper than the full ATX brethren. ASRock are offering the X79 Extreme4-M for one cent less than $225 (MSRP), compared to the larger X79 Extreme4, which weighs in at just less than $235 (MSRP). In an age of austerity, a few dollars here and there can count, even if you splash out on an X79 and Sandy Bridge-E system.
However, there are points to note. These two boards are considerably cheaper than the ASUS P9X79-V Pro and Intel DX79SI I have reviewed so far. So, as you would expect, there are a couple of features you might not get. The biggest one to note is the memory – while on all the boards we have quad channel, for the smaller sum of money you only get one DIMM per channel, compared to two DIMMs per channel on the more expensive boards. As a personal option, this affects fewer people than you may think – of all the people who are going X79, enthusiasts (as opposed to professionals) rarely need more than 16 GB of memory. Given the low cost of 4GB DDR3 sticks, these ASRock boards can easily be filled with memory at little cost. If you need more, you could look at 8 GB sticks just coming onto the market, otherwise yes, you will need two DIMMs per channel motherboard.
In comparison between the two ASRock boards, you get a lot more than $10 difference in terms of extras on the full size ATX X79 Extreme4 than the price difference suggests – more PCIe slots and space for add-on cards, more SATA 6 Gbps ports and more in the box in terms of cables and SLI connectors. Thanks to the extra space, the PCIe x16 slots are also more beneficial for airflow in dual GPU setups on the Extreme4. As a result, you may see the mATX Extreme4-M being sold with small discounts (e.g. currently $219 at time of writing, saving £6) to reflect the true difference.
The Extreme4 also performs slightly better, especially in the memory overclock, though that may be down to the updated BIOS version which ASRock had not released for the Extreme4-M at the time of testing. Nevertheless, the Extreme4 would be my choice if I had to choose between these two boards for performance. If you absolutely need a mATX board, the Extreme4-M is not a bad choice. However, you will not be pushing any of the boards too hard on a CPU overclock. And for the noise conscious, you will definitely have to change that default CPU fan setting of a constant 100%.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
54 Comments
View All Comments
prophet001 - Friday, December 9, 2011 - link
b/c this is perfect grammar"Also, whats with fascination with older video "
mischlep - Friday, December 9, 2011 - link
Minor typo on recommendations page:(e.g. currently $219 at time of writing, saving £6) Should be "saving $6".
zanon - Friday, December 9, 2011 - link
Interesting review overall. A few comments:Page 6:
You still refer to setup stuff as "BIOS" even though it's clearly (I hope?) UEFI nowadays. Any particular reason for this? Or is it actually still BIOS for real despite clearly saying UEFI on that screen. It's confusing that you use both if you only mean one.
Also on page 6: "With the XFast RAM software, users can shift certain parts of the OS to the RAMdisk, such as the memory pagefile"
What. The entire *point* of a pagefile is that all your physical memory is used up and you're now hitting secondary storage. Reducing your main memory in order to make a RAMdisk that you then...use for memory? Nope nope nope.
Spivonious - Friday, December 9, 2011 - link
Yeah, I don't understand why you'd want the pagefile in RAM instead of just using the RAM.JonnyDough - Friday, December 9, 2011 - link
What he said. Some programs require a pagefile. Allocated memory and a pagefile are not the same.JonnyDough - Friday, December 9, 2011 - link
Also, a pagefile can be dumped/saved on shut down. RAM is cleared.Aisalem - Friday, December 9, 2011 - link
Some of the software will not work properly or will simply crash in some situation if you will have no pagefile enabled. That's why having RAMdisk is very good idea as even if you will have 32GB RAM you still need at least 300MB pagefile on the system to be sure that all software will run proper. Using XFast RAM you simply "cheating" system by creating special partition with only pagefile on it making sure that system is running stable.zanon - Friday, December 9, 2011 - link
Um, no. Windows doesn't have that crappy a VM system, nor does any other modern OS. While some applications may check for the presence of a pagefile if the authors that wrote them were brain dead morons (you should search for other applications in that case), the OS isn't going to start paging anything out of main memory while there is still free or inactive memory available. It'll only start hitting the VM when main memory is consumed. Leave it to the OS. If you want things to go faster once you exceed your maximum physical main memory, get an SSD. Get an SSD anyway, actually.Wardrop - Friday, December 9, 2011 - link
Actually, at work I regularly used up all 8GB of my RAM while running VM's and multi-tasking. When that happened, some programs would spontaneously crash and disappear. Re-enabling the page file (only a small 512MB page file) fixed the problem. This was on Windows 7 x64 by the way. I use to always turn off my page file, but now I always keep a small page file enabled for that reason.JonnyDough - Friday, December 9, 2011 - link
You and Spivonious are so obviously not researched on the matter of using a ramdisk. I suggest you study up before posting, you look like a fool.