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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lordken - Friday, April 3, 2015 - link
Rather you should apology for being lazy. abufrejoval did run some math for you, so its pretty clear that all 18x ports wont deliver full bandwidth. If you need to run 18x SSD at full speed then you probably need server board or something.If you want to troll go elsewhere.
petar_b - Friday, January 29, 2016 - link
abufrejoval is not theoretical - 1 SSD on PCH can do 400Mb/s, but 4 SSDs simultaneously can give less 100MB/s transfer each. Now move that on SAS controller and each SSD gives 400MB/s.Once you start using SSDs on SAS - you will never go back to PCH.
I posted article a year ago on the web showing differences I have measured with crystal benchmark - values are shocking... measurements were based on ASRock X79 Extreme11, same SAS controller just CPU and RAM bit slower.
wyewye - Friday, March 13, 2015 - link
Good point duploxxx.I haven't seen a professionally done review on this site for quite a while.
petar_b - Friday, January 29, 2016 - link
Motherboard has nothing to do with gaming, go for ROG if you wish gaming. Business use, rendering, 3D where storage needs to be fast and has to be SAS.We are using older generation of the board X79 with PLX and SAS controller. There are no words nor space here to explain you what performance increase we we hook up 8 SSDs (960G) on SAS instead of Intel...
It's perfect for virtualization on or cloud realization - example: 128GB RAM + 6T SSDs can accomodate more than 20 vmware images, each with 4GB ram, running perfectly on Xeon.
@dicobalt - keeping porn ? it's so sad ppl think no further than gaming and watching tv. go buy book and learn something... mathlab, 3d studio and earn money. actually get a tv and watch porn there.
3DoubleD - Wednesday, March 11, 2015 - link
Thanks for the review! This board is incredible. I run a storage server with a software raid (Unraid) and this board alone would handle all of my SATA port needs without the need for any PCIe SATA cards. The only issue is the price though. For $600 I could easily buy a $150 Z97 motherboard with 8 SATA ports and two PCIe 8x slots, buy two $150 PCIe 2.0 8x cards (each with 8 SATAIII ports), and I'd still have money left over (probably put it towards a better case!). Also, that's not counting the significant difference in CPU and DDR4 costs.Clearly this motherboard is meant for a use case beyond a simple storage server (so many PCIe 8x slots!), so I can't say they missed their intended mark. However, I really wish they could attempt something like this on the Z97 platform, more than 10 SATA ports but with no more than two (or three) PCIe 8x slots (even if some of them are 4x). Aim for a price below $250.
I can't pretend it would be a big seller, but I know I'd buy one!
WithoutWeakness - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
ASRock has the Z87 Extreme11 with 22 SATA III ports (6 from chipset, 16 from LSI controller) along with 4-way SLI support (x8,x8,x8,x8) and a pair of Thunderbolt 2 ports. I'm not sure how feasible it is to plan on using all of those with only 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes from the socket 1150 CPU but it sounds like everything you're asking for. Unfortunately it came in over $500, double your asking price.I think you'll be hard pressed to get what you're looking for at that $250 mark, especially on a Z97 board. Socket 1150 CPUs only have 16 lanes and every manufacturer who is willing to put an 8+ port RAID controller on board will also want a PLX PCIe bridge chip to avoid choking other PCIe devices (GPU's, M.2 drives, etc). The RAID chip alone would bring a $100 motherboard into the $200+ range and adding the PLX chip would likely bring it to $250+. At that point every manufacturer is going to look at a board with 14+ SATA ports, a PLX chip, and a Z97 chipset and say "lets sell it to gamers" and slap on some monster VRM setup, additional USB 3.0 ports, 4 PCIe 16x lanes, bake in some margin, and sell it for $400+.
3DoubleD - Friday, March 13, 2015 - link
Makes sense. Thanks for the suggestion, I'll look into it. Not sure why I've never come across this board, doesn't seem like it is sold at any of the common outlets I shop at (Newegg.ca, ect.). Still, going the add-in SATA cards seems to be the more economical way.wintermute000 - Sunday, March 15, 2015 - link
You wouldn't have ECC with Z97.Maybe unraid is better than ZFS/BTRFS but I still wouldn't roll with that much storage on a software solution (vs HW RAID) without ECC.
Vorl - Wednesday, March 11, 2015 - link
This is such a strange board. with 18 SATA connections, the first thing everyone will think is "storage server". if all 18 ports were handled with the same high end RAID controller then the $600 price tag would make sense. As it is, this system is just a confused jumble of parts slapped together.Who needs 4 PCIE x16 slots on a storage server? That is an expense for no reason.
Who needs 18 SATA connections that are all mixed around on different controllers that can't all be hardware raided together? Sure, you can run software raid, but for $600 you can buy a nice raid card, and sas to sata breakout cards and cables, and still be ahead due to full hardware performance with cache.
Also, for a server, why would they not have the IGP port? I may be missing something, but I thought they CPU has integrated graphics.
Just not an awesome setup from what I can tell.
So.. why bother having all those sata ports if they aren't all tied to RAID?
They add an LSI controller, and that isn't even what handles RAID on the system.
1nf1d3l - Wednesday, March 11, 2015 - link
LGA2011 processors do not have integrated graphics.