Conclusive thoughts

The X58 Extreme3 from ASRock is a nice improvement over the last generation. The board looks much better having a black/white/blue color scheme and the cooling got improved on the VRM(newly designed heatsink with fins and active cooling). The VRM cooler is linked with the chipset heatsink with one heatpipe, which gets pretty hot during load.

Thanks to the new cooling system, there were no stability problems when running the CPU at 4GHz for a long time; on the previous X58 Extreme, I was sometimes getting system shutdowns, because of the excessive heat on the VRM and X58 chipset.

Another useful feature is the extra holes for older LGA775 coolers or water blocks, so if we decide to keep and use the old cooling system, we can without any problems.

The PCI Express slot retention mechanism has also been improved compared to the X58 Extreme.

The THX TrueStudio Pro application from Creative is a nice addition in the bundle and offered free of charge (registered version). On the installation disk we can also find the X-FI MB application, but this one is offered only as trial and it is functional only for 30 days.

The integrated USB 3.0, SATA3 (6GBps) and eSATA3 make this board future proof and it is much better to have the chips integrated instead of installing expansion cards which could take up important space in the case.

Price wise this board makes for an affordable USB 3/SATA 600 enabled motherboard, at around $200, which is $30-50 more than the original X58 Xtreme.



I would like to thank ASRock making this review possible.