14 DAY TRIAL // Since we've already seen the LGA 1150 motherboards from Biostar and Gigabyte, including a particularly overpowered model from the latter, we may as well look at the ones from ASRock as well.
Heise.de reports that ASRock has two LGA 1150 motherboards on display in Hannover, Germany, at the CeBIT 2013 trade show.
The Z87-Extreme6 ATX model is the stronger of the two, with a 10-phase VRM powering the CPU socket, four DDR3 DIMM memory slots, three PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots, and a PCI Express 2.0 x1 slot, plus a mini PCI e and a legacy PCI slot.
DVI, HDMI, and D-Sub make up the video output range, while four USB 3.0 ports and 8-channel audio, plus Gigabit Ethernet, populate the rest of the back panel.
Eight SATA 6 Gbps provide HDD, SSD and SSHD support. Six of them are powered directly by the X87 chipset, the other two by an extra, third-party controller processor.
The other motherboard, B85M, uses the B85 chipset and is, thus, more of an entry-level platform, with micro-ATX form factor and just two DDR3 memory slots.
A PCI Express 3.0 x16 will accept a high-end video board, but there are only a PCI Express 2.0 x16 (x4 electrical) and two legacy PCI slots besides it.
Two DDR3 memory slots are available as well, versus the other one's four. It is plain to see that ASRock aimed for affordability over performance in this case.
We should, however, mention that the component/PCB color schemes, heatsinks, etc., haven't been finalized. Thus, the LGA1150 motherboards only qualify as rough drafts for now. The printed circuit boards even seem a bit barren really, compared to the other platforms we mentioned above.
Understandably enough, no pricing or availability details have been released yet. We suspect that May or June is when updates come to the surface.
