amazon ASRock Z97 Extreme4 reviews
The new ASRock motherboard design is based on the Intel Z97 Express Chipset along with some of its unique technologies, which are suitable for building a high-performance configuration with flexible overclocking support.
Design
The ASRock Z97 Extreme4 is part of the Intel 9 series motherboards with Intel Core i socket LGA1150 (Haswell and Broadwell) processors. In addition to the inherent advantages of the Haswell platform, Asrock’s new motherboard model also features enhanced M.2 SSD support via PCI Express interface and new features such as improved power management capabilities. Supports micro SSD (μSSD) and single-chip SSDs in embedded SSDs.
Unlike previous generations, the ASRock Z97 Extreme4 uses outstanding green tones on a black circuit board to create an accent. The Mosfet radiator and chipset are also redesigned with larger air contact area, which helps to cool the underlying hardware efficiently. 12-phase Digi Power digital circuitry ensures that processor power, integrated graphics, memory and memory controllers are more stable and accurate than traditional analog circuits.
ASRock also adopts a new component standard called Super Alloy with Sapphire Black PCB to reduce short circuit in high humidity and high quality components such as Mosfet ” Dual stack “(DSM) with 2 layers of insulating silicon, Premium Alloy Choke alloy chokes have better heat and noise resistance and multiple filter cap for increased stability and durability motherboard overclocking.
Onboard motherboards also have built-in power, reset, and LED indicators for operating status as well as identifying fault codes when the system crashes. In addition, users can also customize the hardware parameters in the UEFI BIOS visually or automatically configure according to the pre-set profiles.
The Z97 Extreme4 features two PCI Express x16 3.0 slots with discrete graphics with up to 16x bandwidth or x8 / x8 mode sharing in the case of 2-way SLI or CrossFire graphics.
Purity Sound 2 audio technology with Realtek ALC1150 chip, Texas Instruments Amp NE5532 chip dedicated high-end headphones with high impedance, Nichicon capacitors with filter function and frequency amplification, to fully reproduce the band sound frequencies are at a small volume.
Similar to the previous Z87 chipset motherboard, the entire SATA port Z97 Express platform motherboard supports 3.0 (6Gb / s bandwidth), which allows users to configure complex hard drives (RAID 5, 6, 10 …) completely with SATA 3.0 connectivity.
A number of peripheral connectors on the back cover, including PS / 2 keyboard (or mouse) ports, two USB 2.0 ports, eight USB 3.0 ports, a gigabit Ethernet port, 7.1 HD audio and Particularly up to 4 outputs analog and digital signals.
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Performanc
To assess gamer performance, Test Lab uses experimental configuration with an Intel Core i7-4770K CPU, integrated HD Graphics 4600 graphics on a Windows 7 x64 sp1 platform, and the accompanying hardware drivers.
Tools include PCMark 8 for overall performance and component tests such as CineBench R11.5 (64 bit), 3DMark Cloud Gate, Heaven Benchmark v4.0, and PCMark 05. During testing, the motherboard Works with factory default settings and tests are taken an average of three runs.
Compared to some Z97 Test Lab motherboards tested, the overall performance of the ASRock Z97 Extreme4 was rated higher and even better than the Asus Maximus VII Ranger in some tests. Specifically with PCMark 8 Home, the experimental configuration is 4,587 points higher than the Maximus VII Ranger’s 4,541 points.
With Cinebench R11.5 testing capabilities of 3D rendering of CPUs and integrated graphics via the OpenGL library, the test configuration reached 8.59 multi-core CPU tests and 36.41 Frames / sec (fps) on OpenGL test.
In the graphics processing capabilities test with 3DMark Cloud Gate, the system scored 8,032 Physics scores, 8,711 Graphics scores and a 8,550 Overal scores.
With the Heaven Benchmark, a graphics tester has a lot of similarities with 3DMark but emphasizes Tessellation technology in DirectX 11, Z97 Extreme4 at 431 and image processing at 17.1 frames per second. A little bit more than the same motherboard model of Asus.
Power Consumption
Test power consumption of the test configuration (excluding the monitor) shows that in idle mode, the test configuration consumes about 34.7 W (average) and the highest is only 101,9 W in 3DMark test.
Compared to the Z97 Express Test Lab motherboards, the ASRock Z97 Extreme4 is considered to be energy efficient, with lower power consumption than the average.
Test configuration: Intel Core i7-4770K CPU, integrated Graphics HD Graphics 4600, Kingston Beast KHX24C11T3K2 / 16X 16GB RAM, 2.400 MHz bus, 240 GB SSD Corsair Force, 4TB HDD WD4001FAEX, Cooler Master 1.250W Power , Windows 7 x64 sp1.