ASRock Z68 Extreme4 Gen3 Review

Performance Analysis

Once we had our standard test components installed, the Extreme4 set about racing through
our battery of tests. First up was our Media Benchmarks, which proved a simple task for the board. Its score of 1,579 in the image-editing portion of the test was good, although not spectacular.

The board proved average in our video encoding test too, before struggling with our multi-tasking test. Its score of 1,385 in the latter was one of the poorest we’ve seen and dragged its overall score down to an underwhelming 1,887. Gaming performance also proved to be merely average, as the Extreme4 clocked up a minimum frame rate of 73fps at stock speed in Arma II, which is around 2fps behind quicker boards such as the Asus Maximus IV Gene-Z.


Considering the Extreme4’s enthusiast leanings, we were expecting good results from the motherboard when it came to overclocking. Thankfully, we weren’t disappointed, as the board could boot and function with our CPU at a titanic 5.1GHz – a result that we’ve only seen the Asus P8P67-M Pro manage to achieve.

Unfortunately, while this overclock was rock-solid during our Prime95 stress testing, it became unstable halfway through our memory-intensive image-editing test. We tried adding extra voltage and tweaking various other settings, but no amount of fiddling could persuade the motherboard to complete the test.

This was frustrating, as the Extreme4 was able to negotiate both our video encoding and multi-tasking test at 5.1GHz. As a result, we had to knock back the overclock to 5GHz – which is still respectable – to obtain our overclocked results. This overclock required a vcore of 1.47V, a PCH of 1.17V, a CPU PLL of 1.93V and a VTT 1.16V. We also set the board’s Load Line Calibration to Level 1, which is its highest setting.

At these settings, the Extreme4’s performance improved dramatically, although it was still the slowest LGA1155 board we’ve tested. As was the case at stock speed, the Extreme4 performed well in the image editing and video encoding tests but its multi-tasking performance was a letdown, dragging down its overall overclocked score to 2,628. Gaming performance also improved after overclocking but, as with its 2D results, the gain wasn’t enough to really make the board stand out.

Conclusion

We’re happy to see ASRock making strides to improve its motherboards; the ASRock Z68 Extreme4 Gen3 certainly looks like a premium board thanks to the improvements to its design, it has a decent feature set and it's a good overclocker too. However, these improvements haven't been accompanied by solid performance, as the Extreme4 Gen3 lags behind the best Z68 and P67 motherboards currently available.