ASRock's Upcoming P67 Extreme6 Sandy Bridge Motherboard Gets Picture Preview

Recently, ASRock has enjoyed quite some media hype thanks to its partnership with pro gamer Jonathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel, but the resulting P67 Professional isn't the company's only top of the line LGA 1155 motherboard, the P67 Extreme6 also standing up there with the best of them, a Chinese website just posting a picture preview of this upcoming board.

As is the case with most other ASRock designed LGA 1155 boards, this too makes use of a rather dull black and gray paint scheme, the only touch of color being brought by the blue memory and PCIe x16 slots.

However, from an engineering standpoint, the Extreme6 is the most advanced Intel P67 motherboard from ASRock's lineup (if we don't count the Fatal1ty built P67 Professional that is), its power delivery circuit being made up of no less than 16 phases that are complemented by Nichicon-built gold plated capacitors.

The advanced VRM is cooled by two heatsinks, an additional heatsink being placed on the Intel P67 PCH, all of these being connected via a heatpipe.

This should prove to be quite an effective cooling setup, although I am sure that under normal operating conditions the upcoming Sandy Bridge CPUs won't draw so much power in order to put this advanced VRM circuitry to the test.

Moving on, the board is also equipped with three PCIe x16 slots, but going for a dual-GPU setup will divide the available lanes between the two slots so they will actually run at PCIe x8, the third one being limited to x4 operation.

In addition to the three PCI Express slots, users get two regular PCI and one PCIe x1 slot, no less than 10 SATA connectors also making their way onto the board (four of these offering SATA 6Gbps functionality).



Further additions include a BIOS debug display, on-board Power and Reset buttons, a backpanel Clear CMOS button, four USB 3.0 ports, one eSATA port as well as two Ethernet connectors and audio SPDIF out.



Finally, I'll let you take a look for yourself at ASRock's Extreme 6 motherboard, pricing to be announced when the motherboard becomes official (via Xfastest).