Today ASRock decided to share two new board designs with us, showing us the X99 Extreme6 and the X99 Extreme4. They are both ATX motherboards and are largely identical, with a couple of subtle differences.
The X99 Extreme6 and the X99 Extreme4 both have an LGA2011-3 socket, which is wired to eight DDR4 memory slots that support quad-channel memory. They also both come with ten SATA3 (6 Gb/s) ports, along with a single Ultra M.2 slot, which is wired to four PCI-Express 3.0 lanes for up to 32 GB/s of bandwidth. Both boards also come with ASRock’s Purity Sound 2.0 audio hardware. We spotted six fan headers on both boards; two for the CPU, one for power, and three chassis fan headers.
The Extreme4 board has four PCI-Express x16 slots, although you’ll only be able to install three dual-slot graphics cards. The same goes for the Extreme6 board, which has three PCI-Express x16 slots. While the Extreme6 sacrifices one PCI-Express x16 slot in exchange for an x1 slot, it does have a mini-PCI-Express slot that can be used to install wireless cards. The Extreme6 model also has an extra USB 3.0 front header, an internal USB 2.0 port, two additional USB 3.0 ports, dual Intel Gigabit Ethernet and an additional heatsink near the rear I/O. The Extreme6 board also has a debug Q-code readout, which the Extreme4 appears to be missing.
The differences between the X99 Extreme4 and the X99 Extreme6 are in the details, and mostly connectivity-related. If you specifically need the additional connectivityprovided by the X99 Extreme6 board, then go for that. Otherwise, the X99 Extreme4 will probably suit your needs.
ASRock also shared with us that all of the X99 motherboards have 12-phase VRM circuitry and that there are upcoming models with 1300 W CPU support. That surprised us a bit, but an ASRock spokesman said the support was for extreme overclocking under super cold environments (AKA liquid nitrogen).
No word on pricing or official availability yet, although we do expect the new Haswell-E CPUs, along with these motherboards and DDR4 to launch on August 29.
