The ASRock X99 Extreme11 Review: Eighteen SATA Ports with Haswell-E
by Ian Cutress on March 11, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Storage
- ASRock
- X99
- LGA2011-3
ASRock X99 Extreme11 In The Box
With money-is-no-object type motherboards, the package has to consider the market. Do prosumers want 18 SATA cables, or are they using a system with a backplane that comes with it all? Are buyers going to want to game, or are they Xeon Phi users for compute and don't need SLI bridges? One could argue that given the cost of the package, it should all be bundled anyway to encompass all users, but event at this price bracket if the manufacturer can save a few cents, they might do so.
In the ASRock X99 Extreme11 box we get the following:
Driver DVD
User Manuals
Rear IO Shield
HDD Saver Cable
Six SATA Cables
Two Rigid 2-way dual-slot SLI connectors
One Rigid 2-way quad-slot SLI connector
One Rigid 4-way SLI connector
Two M.2 Screws
A Carry Bag
This is pretty much what I would have expected from a motherboard like this. As it does not fall under the gaming or overclocking lines, there are no gaming or OC add-ons: just cables and SLI bridges. It might have been interesting to have included a drive bay for the two onboard USB 3.0 headers, especially one that might fit a boot drive also. Perhaps because in 2015 a lot of cases come with at least one USB 3.1 header now, ASRock sees little need.
Many thanks to...
We must thank the following companies for kindly providing hardware for our test bed:
Thank you to OCZ for providing us with PSUs and SSDs.
Thank you to G.Skill for providing us with memory.
Thank you to Corsair for providing us with an AX1200i PSU.
Thank you to MSI for providing us with the NVIDIA GTX 770 Lightning GPUs.
Thank you to Rosewill for providing us with PSUs and RK-9100 keyboards.
Thank you to ASRock for providing us with some IO testing kit.
Thank you to Cooler Master for providing us with Nepton 140XL CLCs.
Test Setup
| Test Setup | |
| Processor | Intel Core i7-5960X ES 8 Cores, 16 Threads, 3.0 GHz (3.5 GHz Turbo) |
| Motherboards | ASRock X99 Extreme11 |
| Cooling | Cooler Master Nepton 140XL |
| Power Supply | OCZ 1250W Gold ZX Series Corsair AX1200i Platinum PSU |
| Memory | Corsair DDR4-2133 C15 4x8 GB 1.2V G.Skill Ripjaws 4 DDR4-2133 C15 4x8 GB 1.2V |
| Memory Settings | JEDEC @ 2133 |
| Video Cards | MSI GTX 770 Lightning 2GB (1150/1202 Boost) |
| Video Drivers | NVIDIA Drivers 332.21 |
| Optical Drive | LG GH22NS50 |
| Case | Open Test Bed |
| Operating System | Windows 7 64-bit SP1 |
ASRock X99 Extreme11 Overclocking
Experience with ASRock X99 Extreme11
While the positioning of the Extreme11 indicates it is a board more so for functionality rather than overclocking, it does offer ASRock’s base array of overclocking options in both the BIOS and software. This includes the Optimized CPU OC Configuration drop downs in both the BIOS and software, although it should be noted that Xeons cannot overclock via the multiplier.
With our mediocre CPU, the automatic overclocks at 4.4 GHz and beyond caused BSODs when under AVX load, but manual overclocking did give 4.4 GHz at a rather high voltage. There is not much to conclude, due to our processor not being the best, but other motherboards have achieved around the same result with the CPU we have.
Methodology
Our standard overclocking methodology is as follows. We select the automatic overclock options and test for stability with PovRay and OCCT to simulate high-end workloads. These stability tests aim to catch any immediate causes for memory or CPU errors.
For manual overclocks, based on the information gathered from previous testing, starts off at a nominal voltage and CPU multiplier, and the multiplier is increased until the stability tests are failed. The CPU voltage is increased gradually until the stability tests are passed, and the process repeated until the motherboard reduces the multiplier automatically (due to safety protocol) or the CPU temperature reaches a stupidly high level (100ºC+). Our test bed is not in a case, which should push overclocks higher with fresher (cooler) air.
Overclock Results
Power delta between the stock and highest overclocked performance gives +152W, and when allowing for the 140W TDP gives an estimated total power consumption at 292W when overclocked to 4.4 GHz.
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Stylex - Friday, March 13, 2015 - link
with that logic we should still have usb 1.1 or serial ports. All USB3 just makes things easier to plug in, as you don't have go looking for the 'special' ports.wmaciv01 - Wednesday, March 11, 2015 - link
I just built a system with this board to host my ANS-9010's (x4 32GB in an 8 port RAID 0). Still kind of tinkering with it and exploring the BIOS. I installed the 40 lane 6 core Haswell and have 32GB Mushkin RED DDR4 2400 and a Samsun xp941 256GB as the boot drive. Case is an Xigmatek Elysium. Wish I could post some pics/bench stats for you guys.darkfalz - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
8 port RAID 0 - I hope nothing critical resides on that drive.dishayu - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
I'm not so sure if I would buy a motherboard without USB-C ports today.darkfalz - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
18 SATA ports but no onboard RAID-5 or 6 - almost a LOL moment, but I suppose you could do your boot SSD and then run a huge soft raid array...Navvie - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
I'd be interested to see ZFS benchmarks, assuming of course the LSI controller still allows the drives to be accessed as JBOD.mpogr - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
It doesn't look like the guys here heard about ZFS, otherwise they wouldn't complain about lack of hardware RAID...mpogr - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
This board could be interesting for either a bare metal or virtualised ZFS-based storage server. There is no need in hardware RAID for that one, just fast SATA ports, fast CPU and lots of RAM. Having PCIe 3.0 slots is beneficial for Infiniband cards and, without a switch (which for 40Gbit+ IB costs 1000s), you'd need a few of them, so multiple x8 or slots are beneficial. ECC RAM support (with Xeon CPUs) is a must for such a server as well.What's missing? First and foremost, onboard graphics and IPMI! You want to be able to run this sucker headless. Second, what the heck is with the price? Comparable Supermicro boards (e.g. X10SRH-CF, with IPMI!) cost $400. Yes, they don't support multi-GPU graphics or overclocking, but who needs those on a storage server? I think this board completely missed its target audience...
JohnUSA - Friday, March 13, 2015 - link
$630 ? Ouch, no thanks.mapesdhs - Monday, March 16, 2015 - link
Without any cache, the SAS controller is useless. Lack of cache really kills 4K performance,especially with SSDs (I've tested this with a P410 vs. other cards). With cache included, even
just 1GB, 4K performance can be amazing, over 2GB/sec.
Hence, as others have said, better off using a different cheaper board and a separate SAS card
that does have cache and a BBU, including any numerous X79 boards, though if storage is a
focus then something with 10GigE support makes more sense, XEON, ECC (unless one is using
ZFS I guess), in which case one is moving away from consumer X79/X99 anyway.
mpogr makes some interesting points; thing is, there are proper XEON server boards available
for less anyway, put a SAS card on one of those and away you go, no need to worry about any
consumer-related mbd issues. Afterall, if one is going to be using a XEON and ECC then oc'ing
doesn't matter at all.
I was considering an X79 Extreme11 a couple of years ago for a pro system I was building for
someone (they couldn't afford a dual-XEON setup), but the lack of SAS cache meant it was
not worthwhile. Used an ASUS P9X79 WS instead and I'm glad I did.
Ian.