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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jasica - Thursday, March 19, 2015 - link
as a professionally i agreed with duploxxx there are no reason to buy this board. because every one is not like gaming !<a href="http://www.topmediabox.com/">Real TV</a>
Native7i - Thursday, April 23, 2015 - link
I expected more USB ports at rear panelSaelnaydar - Friday, May 15, 2015 - link
Hello,Not all sorage ports are usable the way you want or the way you think, raids ports are only bound to one part of connectors.
If you are using SATA-M2 cards, the connectivity shares bandwith with some ports and you have to figure out what are unshared ports that supports raids
SSD should be bound to some special ports and not shared with M2, raids .. Wiring setup and nightmare...the storage part is not as easy at it sounds.
More importantly for a 700 Euro card !
The 3 Way SLI Does not work out of the box, a big drawback for a 4X16x 3.0 PCIE Motherboard with 2 build in chipsets supporting up to 4XSLI
I finaly made it to 3 ways SLI
First 3 way it was buggy and achieved lesser performance than 2 Way SLI
With a lot of cards switch and testings i finaly "as a last option" updated BIOS to 1.2 (wich was not there in january whan i bought the MB)
The Bios flash to 1.2 of my Asrock X99 Extreme 11 made work the 3 ways SLI configuration.
There was no indication on forums or in bios update or release notes that the bios was fixing SLI but IT does for me.
afbfxt - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
I promise this will be good and I guarantee you cant make this stuff up.The ASRock X99 Extreme11 advertizes itself as a MOBO that has 8 SAS-3 ports on it. However the SAS-3 ports are the same form factor as a seven-pin SATA connector. In the MOBO manual it states "For connecting SAS HDDs, please contact SAS data cable dealers" because ASRock does not include the SAS-3 cables necessary. So I contacted all the SAS-3 cable manufactures in the USA and they all said they have never heard of a SAS-3 cable that had a SFF-8482 connector on one end and a seven-pin SATA connector on the other end that supports 12 GB/s. So I e-mailed ASRock support and asked them if they knew where I could get a SAS-3 cable like this and they never responded. So I did a Google search to see if anyone was having the same problem and I found one other person that was. The whole reason why ASRock is charging over 600.00 dollars for this board is because it offers an LSI SAS 3008 SCSI controller on board but obviously it's completely useless, so they're just ripping you off.
At first I was extremely angry but after a few days I found this whole incident to be hilarious.
I mean, can you imagine a company doing something like this. LOL!!!!!!!!!
I would never buy anything from ASRock ever again and I don't recommend anybody buying anything from them either. I will stick with and recommend to others more reputable brands like ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI etc.
petar_b - Friday, January 29, 2016 - link
Did you try using regular SATA cable and power connector from your power supply ? You won't get far if you wish to use SFF-8482 ....afbfxt - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
I promise this will be good and I guarantee you cant make this stuff up.The ASRock X99 Extreme11 advertizes itself as a MOBO that has 8 SAS-3 ports on it. However the SAS-3 ports are the same form factor as a seven-pin SATA connector. In the MOBO manual it states "For connecting SAS HDDs, please contact SAS data cable dealers" because ASRock does not include the SAS-3 cables necessary. So I contacted all the SAS-3 cable manufactures in the USA and they all said they have never heard of a SAS-3 cable that had a SFF-8482 connector on one end and a seven-pin SATA connector on the other end that supports 12 GB/s. So I e-mailed ASRock support and asked them if they knew where I could get a SAS-3 cable like this and they never responded. So I did a Google search to see if anyone was having the same problem and I found one other person that was. The whole reason why ASRock is charging over 600.00 dollars for this board is because it offers an LSI SAS 3008 SCSI controller on board but obviously it's completely useless, so they're just ripping you off.
At first I was extremely angry but after a few days (and my RMA approval) I found this whole incident to be hilarious. I mean, can you imagine a company doing something like this. LOL!!!!!!!!!
I would never buy anything from ASRock ever again and I don't recommend anybody buying anything from them either. I will stick with and recommend to others more reputable brands like ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI etc.
petar_b - Friday, January 29, 2016 - link
No it's not rip off. each plx has price of 60 usd (you can find this on web), SAS controller that one would buy as PCIe card is aprox 300, meanis you pay 420 usd here just for good SAS implementation (meaning you need PLX or you can't run dual graphic card setup without PLX - don't forget that SAS takes 4 lanes).Yes board could be cheaper, but it's a product for narrow audience... they have to compensate. ASUS WS, Gigabyte also use PLX, you can see how prices increase rapidly when they provide PLXes ...
There is no way out wihout PLX if you want SAS and multi graphic card setup.
d_sing - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
Does anyone know if this board will support 8TB HDDs on all 18 ports at once? (i.e. 18 x 8TB = 144TB) Considering this board for a server build...