ASRock X99 Extreme 11 Review

Performance Analysis

At stock speed, there's usually very little difference betwen X99 motherboards now, with just a few frames per second to be gained in games and this is largely due to the CPU clock speed and how aggressive turbo boosting is. The X99 Extreme 11 sat above average in Bioshock Infinite, albeit just 3fps above the lowest minimum frame rate we saw but was a tad slow in Battlefield 4. Thankfully things improved in the PCMark8 8 tests, again with above average results along with mid-table results in the Terragen 3 and Cinebench R15 rendering tests.


Power consumption was admitedly on the high side but given how many extra controllers the ASRock X99 Extreme 11 has, this doesn't come as much of a surprise. The idle stock speed result was actually about the same as the Asus X99 Deluxe, while the ASRock board only increased a little once we'd overclocked it too. Under load it wasn't quite as extreme, drawing 30W less than the Asus X99-Pro and the modest overclock helped it to a reasonable power draw, with both the Asus X99 Deluxe and ASRock Fatal1ty X99M Killer drawing more, although the latter was as a result of a higher overclock.


Storage performance was, thankfully, excellent, with the M.2 speed managing to pip our previous bests by a fraction. If you plan on hooking up SATA 6Gbps SSDs to the LSI SAS 3008-powered ports then these showed no signs of being any slower than the Intel X99-powered ones. In fact they were a little faster, resulting in the X99 Extreme 11 posting the fastest M.2 and SATA 6Gbps results. The same could be said for the onboard audio performance. It was second only to ASRock's own Fatal1ty X99M Killer.

Conclusion

As with most things in life, there's a certain amount of diminishing returns with higher prices when you consider X99 motherboards can be had for a third as much as the X99 Extreme 11. That is selling this crazy motherboard short though; no, you don't need to spend £500 to be able to give a home to one of Intel's LGA2011-v3 CPUs, but the X99 Extreme 11 adds plenty more features to the fray that go a long way to justifying the asking price.

This is a part enthusiast/part professional motherboard, as the 18 SATA ports, dual PLX switches and SAS controller suggest. Asus's excellent X99 Deluxe, which is also a superior board in many ways, is pretty much the furthest you need to go as far as your "average" super-premium multi-GPU gaming rig is concerned. The X99 Extreme 11 is an order of magnitude further down the line - sorry to rain on your parade of willy waving, but if you only have a couple of SSDs and hard disks and two or three graphics cards then this board is overkill for you.

If, however, you need some serious storage grunt in addition to the already ample number of SATA 6Gbps ports offered by Intel's X99 chipset, and need the extra PCI-Express bandwidth the X99 Extreme 11 offers (or just want it for peace of mind), then it's probably one of the few X99 motherboards that will meet your needs. The EFI isn't top notch, the chipset fan is noisy and it's hugely expensive, but the X99 Extreme 11 convinced us that it otherwise has what it takes to sit at the heart of a monster PC.