ASRock X58 Extreme review

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coming soon.

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[Weez_Dawg]

Thanks for the review. I just ordered the board as it was the least expensive/most feature rich X58 board I have seen. This will be my first time to use an Asrock board.

[Tweakurr]

Originally Posted by Weez_Dawg

Thanks for the review. I just ordered the board as it was the least expensive/most feature rich X58 board I have seen. This will be my first time to use an Asrock board.

Welcome to the Asrock Family Weez_Dawg.

It does look like a cool board.

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How is your new board?

[Weez_Dawg]

I am very happy with my board. I can't say I have any big problems with it. It seems better than alot of the more expensive X58's. The i7 920 I got seemed to run a little hot at first, 51c at idle, I found that the stock hsf was concave and not touching the cpu enough, it was only concave about .0005" but that was all it took to raise the heat. The biggest problem wasnt the idle heat, but the full load heat which the cpu got up to 100c. I lapped the stock hsf on a flat surface with 600 grit sandpaper and now am running at 45c idle and 79c full load (all temps got from using real temp 3.00 and testing done with prime95). If I go back and lap it with finer grit sandpaper I bet I can knock off 2-3c more, but I am not going to do that as I am going to water cooling in a few months. One thing to remember is that intel makes the worst heatsinks ever.

Another small problem I am having is when I OC the RAM to 1600 the CPU gets hotter. With the RAM overclocked the idle temp of the CPU goes up by about 6 or 7c. Is this normal? The ram I am using is OCZ 1600 DDR3 Gold Low Voltage OCZ3G1600LV6GK.

As for Asrock, they do rock and as of right now, I am a customer for life.

(This board sells quick, so if you see it, buy it cause it will not be in stock long)

[Tweakurr]

I would say it makes sense for the CPU temp to rise since you are increasing the data bus speed, therefore allowing the CPU to work harder.

[bluetooth]

Early this year, we reviewed the ASRock X58SupeComputer. It is the top notch mainboard from ASRock which features 4 X PCIe slots supporting CrossFireX and Quad-SLI. Although it has the most flexible solutions, the pricing is generally high for such a well designed board.
To bring down the cost of ownership for Intel X58 systems, ASRock introduced a mid range mainboard based on the Intel X58 chipset. This new board, ASRock X58 Extreme has some similarities to the X58SuperComputer. The most important difference is that this board has 3 full length PCIe slots, thus it cannot support Quad crossfire or Quad SLI.
Instead, it added some interesting new features : TPM. TPM or Trusted Platform Module allows you to secure your working environment with enhanced data protection via high level encryption and decryption.
For DIY users, ASRock added one of our suggestions. That is, switches for Power On/off, Clear Cmos and Reset. You no longer require a screw driver to short the circuit to power on/off, clear cmos or reset the system while you are assembling the system. To help you debug the system, ASRock also added in Dr.Debug, to show you the BIOS POST diagnostics status of your system.
Other features on this board include Instant Boot to boot up to Windows in 4secs, a new feature Instant Flash. Instant Flash can be done within the BIOS Screen and it will search the attached HDD or USB devices for the BIOS and automatically flash it. The board also supports I.E.S, OC Tuner and Smart BIOS.


http://www.ocworkbench.com/2009/asrock/X58-Extreme/g1.htm

[Gabkicks]

I have this board and an i7 920 w/ OCZ Gold 1600 ram. i was wondering if anyone had an OC DNA profile/bios i could use to hit 4ghz w/ a dark knight cooler safely and stabilly? i have sooo much reading and testing to do -_-.

I tried using EZ OC, and CINEBENCHR10 crashed while running. temps went up to 80C as well... :( I'll try prime95. yeah, prime 95 made windows crash lol... I guess i'll just do some more reading before proceeding.

even easy OC settings @ 3.6ghz give me prime95 errors

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80 Deg that is too much.