ASRock X79 Extreme4-M and X79 Extreme4 Review – Sandy Bridge-E meets mATX

In The Box

As mentioned in the Extreme4-M section, if you remember the P67 Extreme4 by ASRock, for ~$160, we got a substantial haul in the box, including a front panel USB 3.0 panel and SSD holder.  Though compared to the X79 Extreme4-M, we get more in the box for our extra $10:

4 x SATA Cables
IO Panel
Driver CD
3 Slot SLI Bridge
Tri-SLI Bridge (3 slot, 2 slot – to fit this board)

I am a little disappointed to be honest, given ASRock’s previous tenacity when it comes to box bundling.

Board Features

ASRock are starting to use Broadcom NICs on their products.  As mentioned in the intro, it is nice to see a high end Realtek Audio Codec in there (ALC898).  On the flip side, with the 4-pin molex CFX/SLI power connector on board in an odd position, one has to wonder whether it is really needed when other boards do not require it.

Overclocking

At the time of testing, the latest BIOS available for the X79 Extreme4 is the 1.50 BIOS.  This, according to ASRock, affords a better overclocking experience.  The 1.50 was not available for the 4-M, so we may get different results here.

ASRock always like offering overclock presets, and the X79 Extreme4 is no different.  We can select between 4.0 GHz and 5.2 GHz in 200 MHz increments, however your mileage may vary depending on the CPU itself, and cooling.  I went straight in at the 4.8 GHz setting, not expecting any trouble.  However, while the board did POST, it did not want to load any OS – the screen would hang with a blinking carat, then after 20 seconds the whole board would reset.

On the 4.6 GHz setting, it all went swimmingly – the board booted without issue.  When running 3DPM (multi-threaded mode), we saw a constant 4.6 GHz in CPU-Z, although the CPU voltage was fairly alarming, running at 1.496 V at full load.  This is about 0.1 volts too much!!  From this, a temperature of 83 degrees Celsius was seen in 3DPM, on an open test bed with the Intel All-in-One Liquid cooler.  When running a thorough CPU and memory test using Blender, the board would declock the CPU to 3.3 GHz when the CPU hit 84 degrees Celsius, and stay there until the end of any CPU load, wholly negating any overclock.

When adjusting the settings manually, I used my common X79 overclock presets – CPU at 1.4 volts, Power Limits to 500W and Core Limits to 500A.  With this, I went straight in with a 46x multiplier (4.6 GHz) without issue.  During 3DPM-MT, the highest temperature seen was 76 degrees Celsius.  However, during the Blender test, due to the lower voltage compared to the auto settings in the previous paragraph, it took about 7 minutes to reach 84 degrees Celsius, and then the CPU backed off to 3.3 GHz.  I turned off CPU Thermal Throttling in the BIOS, and reran the test.  This time, at 85 degrees Celsius, the board decided to shut off completely, with no warning whatsoever.  This must be an ultimate temperature failsafe for the board, however it does leave us with what to suggest with an appropriate overclock.  With an ASRock it seems, it all depends on your cooling – our 4.6 GHz manual adjustment only hit the throttling after several minutes of 100% CPU, so could offer good speed in all but the most strenuous loads.

For memory overclock, we have several options (with a CPU frequency of 100 MHz), from DDR3-800 to DDR3-2400, going up in typical memory straps, as well as standard XMP.  At 1866 MHz and 2133 MHz, the board gave automatic subtimings of 9-11-9-28 2T.  At 2400 MHz, which did not work with the Extreme4-M, we had a completely stable system with the Extreme4, with automatic timings of 10-12-10-33 2T.  This was completely Blender stable.  Unfortunately, the system doesn’t offer further straps than this, so we had to bump the CPU bus frequency to see more.  At the 1.25x gear ratio (125 MHz on CPU, multiplier was lowered accordingly for the same CPU overall speed), the straps offer different values, including 2000 MHz, 2333 MHz, 2666 MHz and 3000 MHz.  At 2000 MHz, the memory defaulted to 11-11-11 which equates to JEDEC settings on the memory.  Thus at 2333 MHz, when the board didn’t boot, I assume it was trying to implement 9-11-9-28 2T, which for this kit is a no go.

An overall overclock of 4.6 GHz and DDR3-2400 (for all 16GB) is a respectable result, limited only by the cooling and the thermal throttling of the board.