14 DAY TRIAL // The motherboard market is bound to see a new wave of product launches as soon as Intel brings out the LGA 2011 socket, so ASRock is, naturally, getting ready to put on as good a showing as possible, as enforces by a recent leak.
This once, it is ASRock that has caught the eye of market watchers, even if it wasn't on purpose (probably).
As it tends to happen from time to time, a leak has cropped up, consisting of a photo of the X79 Extreme7 mainboard.
As the name suggests, this is one of those desktop platforms that makes no concessions in regards to pricing.
Set to be part of the first wave of LGA 2011 boards, its only real quirk is the fact that, given the photo, it seems to have an active cooler on the X79 PCH (platform controller hub).
Back when the northbridge was part of the chipset, active cooling wasn't strange for an enthusiast board.
With the chipset able to qualify as little more than a southbridge, though, this is no longer something one would expect to see, especially since overclockers don't have cause to meddle with PCH voltages, though multi-disk RAID arrays could cause some heat.
Regardless, the rest of the visible features are what really catches the eye, since it isn't every day that someone stumbles upon a mainboard with six DDR3 slots (apparently) and at least five PCI Express x16 slots, four of which are Gen 3.0 (probably).
Other specifications include 9 internal SATA ports, two USB 3.0 headers (for four front panel ports) and a 4-pin Molex to supplement the 24-pin ATX and 8-pin EPS power inputs.
One thing prospective buyers may find strange is the number of RAM ports, since Sandy Bridge-E CPUs have four DDR3 memory channels, so boards should either have four or eight slots (one or two per channel, respectively).
No pricing info or exact availability details exist, but we'll keep an eye and ear out for them.