14 DAY TRIAL // As we mentioned when we wrote about Gigabyte's 7-Series collection of motherboards, other manufacturers have products of this type out as well.
Whether by coincidence or not, ASRock has just as many Ivy Bridge-compatible motherboards as Gigabyte: twelve.
One of them, the ASRock Z77E-ITX, is supposed to be “the most compact mini mobo to date”, but still packs mSATA (for SSD caching).
For small businesses, ASRock made the Q77M vPro and B75 Pro3, powered by the Q77 and B75 chipsets, respectively.
It is the X79 Extreme11 and X79 Champion that target gamers, and they are even called “top gaming machine(s)” in the press release.
The former is “a premium motherboard using luxury material” and, thanks to an LSI SAS2308 chip, boasts eight sets of SAS 6.0 Gbps connectors. This means there are 10 SATA 3 ports (SATA 6.0 Gbps) in total.
Meanwhile, a pair of onboard PLX PEX 8747 bridges provide more PCI Express 3.0 lanes than normal, making the X79 Extreme11 the first platform to support 4-way SLI and CrossFireX multi-GPU setups in PCIe Gen3 x16 / x16 / x16 / x16 mode.
The other star of the show, X79 Champion, is “the world's most powerful gaming kit to date”, with V-Probe (a set of 7 detection points for voltage), Marvel SE9230 controllers (for HyperDuo plus technology where SSDs become cache for HDDs, leading to 14 times faster performance).
Of course, ASRock's exclusive XFast 555 Technology and Lucid Virtu Universal MVP, not to mention Intel Smart Connect and Intel Rapid Start, are all present and accounted for too.
The other two motherboards that we're going to mention are the Z77 Extreme9 and Z77 Professional, which only hardcore overclockers will want to get. They can push memory to over 3,000 MHz and run dual VGA card at PCIe Gen3 x16 / x16 mode or four VGA cards (4-Way SLI / CrossFireX) at PCIe Gen3 x8 / x8 / x8 / x8 mode.