ASRock X99 Extreme6 (LGA 2011-3) Motherboard Review

BIOS and Overclocking

The ASRock UEFI BIOS for the X99 Extreme6 is strikingly similar to the Z97 Extreme6, both clearly share the same fundamental design. From left to right the tabs are as follows: main, OC Tweaker, Advanced, Tool, H/W Monitor, Security, Boot and Exit. The OC Tweaker tab is where the enthusiast will feel at home with all the memory, CPU and voltage options needed to tweak performance. If you’re interested in keeping your BIOS up to date the Tool tab offers an Instant Flash utility that will update the BIOS from a file on a USB drive. On the whole the ASRock UEFI implementation is simple, efficient and fairly lightweight. There are no notable bugs or performance hitches and there’s enough depth to suit the most basic or enthusiastic overclocker. Extreme tweakers will, however, find that ASRock’s UEFI cannot match the ASUS ROG Rampage V Extreme’s advanced BIOS options.

Overclocking

So far, only Gigabyte’s X99 motherboards have been able to produce a stable 4.5GHz overclock on our i7 5960X. ASUS, ASRock and MSI’s have all toppled at the same frequency and voltage suggesting something about Gigabyte’s X99 boards allows stability at the higher frequency. That said speed differences between the two are marginal, in most cases the non-Gigabyte boards, offer faster performance in everything except direct CPU benchmarks. ASRock’s BIOS makes overclocking very simple so there are not complaints here.