For those who though that Extreme9 was overkill, think again

Oct 10, 2012 07:08 GMT  ·  By

Now that the release of AMD's Z-60 APU (formerly known as “Hondo”) is over and done with, leak hunters are hard at work again, trying to unearth new bits of info on unannounced products.

One of the items that have been discovered in this manner, and which will be released with a price tag of around $400-500 / 400-500 Euro, is the ASRock Extreme11.

As a high-end motherboard for Intel central processing units (CPUs), it is built around the Z77 chipset (LGA1155 socket) compatible with Core Series CPUs.

One thing that may not be immediately apparent from the pictures, small as they are, is the size of this beast of a board. Rather than ATX, it has the EATX form factor, which won't fit in any but the largest cases out there.

That said, the board has four DDR3 DIMM memory slots, making 32 GB of memory the largest possible capacity that can be achieved, at speeds of as much as 3 GHz and beyond.

We are actually surprised ASRock didn't go one step further and allow for 64 GB, given the nature of this high-end platform, but we digress.

In addition to the random access memory slots, the board has four SATA II ports (3 Gbps) and ten SATA III ports (6 Gbps), eight of which are compliant with SAS-2 standards. An LSI SAS2308 PCIe 3.0 x8 controller allows for SAS, as well as NCQ, hot plug and LSI MegaRAID support.

Speaking of the PCI Express interface, there are three PCI Express 3.0 slots x16 slots, for graphics cards, and a fourth x16 slot with 2.0 support only (4-way GPU configurations possible, in x8/x8/x8/x4 mode). Furthermore, a mini-PCI Express slot is there, where a bundled WiFi+BT card rests.

As for I/O, the list includes an HDMI output, 7.1 channel audio, two USB 2.0 ports, eight USB 3.0 ports (plus four via headers), eSATA, optical SPDIF, a clear CMOS switch, dual Gigabit Ethernet and PS/2, plus UEFI BIOS, ASRock 555 and Dehumidifier technologies.

All in all, it is a clearly overpowered motherboard, hence the price we’ve mentioned before. Alas, we don't know when sales will begin.

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ASRock Extreme11 EATX motherboard
ASRock Extreme11 EATX motherboardASRock Extreme11 EATX motherboard
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