ASRock P67 Extreme4 Motherboard Review

Motherboards/Intel S1155 by stefan @ 2011-01-22

The Extreme4 P67 motherboard from ASRock is a feature-rich product which incorporates the latest technologies like USB 3.0/SATA3/eSATA3, supports the Sandy Bridge CPUs from Intel and comes with a very easy to use UEFI BIOS; the motherboard comes with a 8+2 power phase design and is offered at a competitive price. In this review we use the board to push our 2500K CPU to 4.8Ghz with air cooling.

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Conclusive Thoughts

I have really enjoyed working with the Extreme4 P67 motherboard from ASRock; the new UEFI is really easy to use and I observed that the realtime RPMs/voltages and temperatures are displayed with a higher refresh rate in the H/W monitor section compared with the BIOSes from older boards. The latest beta UEFI did also have a catchy feature: I was able to take snapshots of the UEFI menus and save them directly to USB storage, only by pressing F12. The output files are BMP, with the 1024x768 resolution!

Getting to 4.8GHz is not a very difficult task thanks to the new CPU architecture and 32nm process (considering that we already have a K CPU handy, with the unlocked multiplier); however, getting to this speed with the lowest voltage possible takes a little time, and the voltages at which the CPU is stable are very different from one CPU to another.

During overclocking, I did not need to use the CMOS Reset button once, the system being very stable in UEFI. The Extreme4 UEFI is also provided with a Boot Failure Guard, which kicks in in case of trouble. Overclocking to 4.8GHz seems to bring a lot of extra performance compared to stock in productivity applications, but less in games. The new CPUs are also much cooler compared to the previous generation; the hottest CPU core did not exceed 68 degrees in Prime95 after one hour, while the multiplier was set at 48, and CPU voltage at 1.265.

 

 

The only UEFI problem that I had was related to mouse hardware support in the UEFI interface: with my ROCCAT Kone the mouse pointer was not moving at all, and when trying with another wireless mouse, the pointer could be barely moved up and down. It seems that this is not an isolated issue and it can be found at other manufacturers too as people report on some forums.

The Extreme4 also offers the latest USB3.0/eSATA3/SATA3 interfaces, so we do not have to bother with addon cards. The board is also shipped with an USB 3.0 Front Panel (which also has the possibility to house a 2.5'' HDD or SSD), that can plugged right into a dedicated USB 3.0 header on the board.

The board layout is not crowded at all and there is plenty of space left between the first and second PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots, to fit video cards with large cooling systems. Also, the VRM cooling has been reworked and I did not have any problems with the system overheating (for example, sudden shutdowns). Also, the ASRock team has also thought of the people that still have older LGA775 water blocks/CPU coolers and want to re-use them, by featuring the Combo Cooler Option.

The P67 Extreme4 does also have a good price/performance ratio and can be found in shops for about 126 Euros.

 

I would like to thank ASRock for allowing us to test their latest products.

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Comment from thorgal @ 2011/01/23
Neatly done Stefan.

Also like your screenshots : which hard/software do you use for making the bios screen shots ?
Comment from jmke @ 2011/01/23
read last page first paragraph, bold part
Comment from thorgal @ 2011/01/23
Completely read over it lol.

Bios shots without some special hardware are a bit of a pain usually.
Comment from geoffrey @ 2011/01/23
via tv-out > tv-capture card you should also be able to do so
Comment from Stefan Mileschin @ 2011/01/23
Thanks for the appreciation! Really like the new UEFI and its screenshot feature.
Comment from jmke @ 2011/01/23
Quote:
Originally Posted by geoffrey View Post
via tv-out > tv-capture card you should also be able to do so
how do you tell BIOS to output image over TV-out? it defaults to the HDMI/D-SUB/DVI connector

HDMI capture card would be better

 

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