http://www.tweaktown.com Today is the big day for Intel and its new
Sandy Bridge-E processors and X79 Express chipset platform. The NDA
just came off moments ago and now we can give you the full run-down
on the ASRock X79 Overclock King Series of motherboards based off
the new platform. Last week we met up with Chris Lee, Director of
Marketing, at the ASRock HQ here in Taipei where he gave us a full
introduction to its first batch of X79 motherboards. ASRock is
launching with five X79 boards right now including the Extreme3,
Extreme4-M (Micro-ATX), Extreme4, Extreme7 and the Extreme9. We
spent most of our time in the video above focused on the top-dog,
the ASRock X79 Extreme9. This board is packed out with loads of
good features including eight DDR3 DIMM slots for quad-channel
memory support, five PCI-E x16 slots, active fan cooling for the
X79 chipset, loads of SATA-III ports and full digital VRM power
management with 18 phases of power for RAM (2) and CPU (16). One of
the big additions with the Extreme9 is the bundle inclusion of the
ASRock Game Blaster which is a PCI-E x1 add-on audio and LAN card
which uses the quad-core Creative SoundCore 3D audio processing
chip for greatly improved gaming audio support over usual onboard
audio usually found on most motherboards. It comes with audio
support for things like THX TruStudio Pro which provides THX
TruStudio Pro Crystalizer, EAX and more. It also packs in another
gigabit LAN port for functions such as dual LAN support. On the
software side of things, as usual, ASRock with each launch comes
out with something new. This time it is ASRock XFast RAM and it
makes good use of all the additional RAM support that some users
will be piling onto their X79 motherboards. As some of you will
know, Windows 32-bit only supports up to 4GB of RAM, so to make use
of all that extra unused RAM that some users will have that are not
running a 64-bit version of Windows, XFast RAM takes care of that.
You can assign a RAM disk