ASRock X79 Extreme9

5-Way Intel X79 Motherboard Shootout

Asrock offered the best bang for the buck in previous motherboard roundups, offering respectable features at unbeatable prices. At first glance, the X79 Extreme9 seems to buck that trend with an intimidating price of $345, but that price seems justified based on the spec sheet alone. Whereas the Asus P9X79 Deluxe was limited to 3-way SLI, the X79 Extreme9 supports four Nvidia and AMD GPUs using PCIe x8/x8/x8/x8 -- at least on paper, anyway. Although the technology is there, the board doesn't seem to have enough room for four individual dual-slot cards. The X79 Extreme9 has eight DIMM slots for up to 64GB of RAM. Using the chipset's quad-channel memory architecture, it supports frequencies of 1866, 1600, 1333 and 1066MHz, while 2400 and 2133MHz are possible with overclocking -- no different than you'll find on Asus' contender. Whereas the X79 chipset provides six SATA ports (two 6Gb/s), Asrock has included three Marvell 6Gb/s controllers for another six ports: the Marvell SE9172 provides four SATA 6Gb/s ports, while the Marvell SE9220 supplies two more.