Conclusion

Allgemein		+	-
The Z97 Extreme6 from ASRock is definitely an interesting board. Next to an attractive design in black and blue all the different connectors for storage media are interesting. Therefore it doesn't matter whether you want to connect standard SATA drives, drives with SATA Express connector or even M.2 SSDs. In case of the M.2 slots there is even an Ultra M.2 port offering up to 32 Gigabit per second of bandwidth (4 Gigabyte per second). On such a motherboard it's then almost standard there is a capable power design. The 12+2 phases with high-side and low-side on each driver MOSFET will guarantee stable power supply for the CPU as well as to the memory. On another note we one more like the audio solution. What you get is a Realtek ALC1150 with EMI shield and alongside the chip there are high-quality Nichicon capacitors and there is also a headphone pre-amp, which allows for connecting headphones with up to 600 Ohm impedance.		- Design - Layout - Features - M.2 Slot - Ultra M.2 Slot
Layout		+	-
Basically the ASRock Z97 Extreme6's Layout has been very well thought. Once more practical are the angled SATA connectors as well as the power- and reset-buttons. There is also a debug display which is very useful in case you should have issues with a component in your system or the board itself. Also the placement of the PCI-Express x16 is very well chosen. Between the first and the second PCI Express x16 slot there are two free slots which means that the first card in a SLI/CrossFire setup gets plenty of fresh air. Another detail we liked is the position of the first PCI-Express x1 slot, that has been located right above the first PCI-Express x16 Gen 3.0 slot. This ensures, that you always have a free x1 slot that can be equipped.		- Angled SATA connectors - Power/Reset-Button onboard - Debug display - Space around the CPU socket - Audio Solution

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 4 - Layout
Page 2 - Specs and Delivery	Page 5 - Connectors and I/O
Page 3 - Features	Page 6 - Conclusion

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Author: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch Luca Rocchi l.rocchi@ocaholic.ch