14 DAY TRIAL // Those Core i5/i7 Devil's Canyon unlocked Intel CPUs may be Intel's best consumer central processing units, but they aren't the best of all Intel's chips.
That honor falls to the HEDT platform, which will be upgraded too in the future, before summer is out.
In anticipation of the release, ASRock has unleashed a pair of motherboards based on the X99 chipset.
You see, the Z98 has the LGA 1150 socket, which isn't compatible with Haswell HEDT. LGA 2011 is the socket for them, and it's that socket that X99 is designed with.
The ASRock X99 Extreme4 boasts a 12-phase VRM, eight DDR4 memory slots (DIMM) and three power inputs (24-pin ATX, 8-pin EPS, and 4-pin Molex power connectors). It also gets four PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots.
The Extreme6 is identical, but has only three PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots, which is odd because the name would imply that it's the superior one.
Fortunately, it's not a cutdown on the feature set, but a trade-off. Where the fourth PCI Express slot would be, there are instead an Ultra-M.2 (x4 link layer) and an mSATA port.
The only other difference between the motherboards is that the Extreme4 has one Gigabit Ethernet port, while the Extreme6 has two. And that's all we know. The Computex 2014 exhibition didn't include an ETA or pricing.
