FRONTPAGE ASRock 990FX Extreme 4 Motherboard Review

Dolk said:

ASRock has given us an opportunity to review one of their midrange AMD boards, the 990FX Extreme4. Although the word ?Extreme? is in the name, the number (4) shows us that it falls in the midrange between the Extreme3 and Extreme7 from their 990FX line. As with a lot of midrange offerings, they do what you need them to do, but may not necessarily give you everything you want. Let's take a closer look at this board and see if it falls into line with that thinking.

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Nice review Dolk

Nice Review. Didn't focus on what I see is ASRock's real strength: Good quality for a good price.

AS Rock tends to have good stuff (like those gold caps) for less money than a Gigabyte or Asus board.

As you state: for a 24/7 light overclock, ASRock specializes in fantastic bang-for-buck, not necessarily the best-of-the-best-at-any-price.

The board itself was sturdy and will probably last long. But that is hard to determine if you only plan to use the board in a review period.

I hope to take this board cold sometime in the near future to see how it will do for intro benchers.

Thanks for the review, but I think several factors that set this motherboard apart from the competition were overlooked. The ASRock slot layout featuring PCI X1 and legacy PCI interfaces in useable locations contrasts with the poor placement on ASUS and others. Inclusion of PATA interface and PS/2 mouse and keyboard connectors is a useful feature for those who tinker or have legacy components available (also less trouble prone for debugging). The debug display and back panel CMOS clear button are very nice touches. As for performance, it will extract everything a high-end AMD processor is capable of delivering on a 24x7 basis. The UEFI BIOS and AXTU need some tweaks including LLC improvement and indication of core temp. Overall the Extreme4 is a versatile and solid implementation of the 990FX/SB950 chipset. I cannot see the rationale for spending $50-$100 on a competing platform that delivers less.

990fx is showing up some real nice boards, that are set out slot wise like for like with intel, which is an issue for me as a amd+sli fanatic who cant run tri on these new boards because nobody makes a bridge with the right spacing

Firstly, I do not quite understand why you actually gave it your approval stamp, or why you might not have done it -- I am missing the reasons.

I understand that the placement of the battery -- under the passive heatsink on the MOSFETs -- is stupid; arguably, it is the clumsiest place on the whole mainboard.

Other than that, I see no drawbacks or faults, perhaps other than the purported ones on an UEFI page, which is, however, just a small inconvenience, perhaps not even a nuisance. Otherwise it is completely irrelevant - who cases about UEFI, anyway?! I do not spend weeks there tinkering with it, perhaps at most minutes, so a one-time delay of a few seconds is not a big show-stopper, at least not for me, definitely not.

I do not understand you reasoning about the "average" and the "enthusiast" mainboard classes. Is an "enthusiast-class" supposed to be a freaky one, completely focused on overclocking tinkering, supporting it with the weirdest options, like overclocking through bluetooth with an iPhone, etc.?

On the other hand, I am missing an LPT port... for my home-made EEPROM programmer -- for that is what I consider "enthusiast". But ASRock has not included them for a while -- even the previous generation of mainboards had to do without them. :-(

Fortunately, this mainboard at least has a conveniently placed 1xPCIe connector that is actually usable -- just like KG4UPR has already mentioned -- where I could add a parallel port card for my beloved programmer... ;-) However, it would cost me some additional 20 €... :-( and simply because of the manufacturer's vanity, as the Super-IO chip certainly supports an LPT port!
Indeed, unlike on many others, it is placed above the slot for the graphics card. On many others, it is placed just below the topmost 16xPCIe for graphics card, so it is not really usable, as it is typically blocked by the heatsink of the graphics card.

In fact, I would prefer an internal LPT connector over a FDD one -- after all, the flash chips got so large that they can now hold UEFI, so the main reason for needing a floppy diskette -- BIOS recovery -- has been obsoleted, and at least on 2 grounds at that: (1) the capacity of the typically available diskette (HD) is too small to hold the whole image to be flashed and (2) the boot block that is typically not overwritten during a normal update is now capable of supporting more sophisticated means of recovery.
(That said, ASRock used to be particularly weak when it came to BIOS recovery, which got it a fairly bad reputation in the past. I do not know how things are at the moment, with UEFI.)

But it also has a PATA port, so I can use my fine stash of DVD burners -- never mind their lack of newer firmware, for I still use the same, well-proven, good quality DVD+R discs, not some new, cheap exotic crap...

So... you failed to account for some of these, IMHO... Moreover, you ought to have tested it with a Zambezi (Bulldozer) processor, as that is perhaps the main reason for getting an 990FX-based mainboard, I reckon, at least for most people, esp. now that Phenoms are being phased out of production and the 990FX chipset (and hence the mainboards based on them) is supposed to stay here longer.

The reason why I gave it an approval stamp is because, for what its worth, its a good board. My reason for that is people, like yourself, that do not tinker with their hardware that much can use this board and be satisfied. The reason why I say that I should not give at an approval is due to the miss labeling of the board. Something labeled "Extreme" should have extreme features.

As for the UEFI, I express that because of the extreme labeling I expected more control over the board and the power. It gives enough features that it will satisfy those, like you, that want to do something quick.

Now you question what is the difference between average and extreme, or what I classify regular users and extreme users. I classify overclockers in a couple ways, one is the typical or average user like you. You do a quick overclock and your fine. The second type is the gamer overclock. Someone that puts effort into their overclock so that they can optimize their games, or tools that utilize the full potential of their computer. And than there is the third type, those that are extreme. They put their computers through LN2 and DICE.

Testing with bulldozer is not a large deal with this board, and at the time of testing I bulldozer was not out. A motherboard review has no reflection on what CPU was used with the test. As long as you stress the full amount of the board through standard overclocking, you can than see how the board feels and works. Like I stated in the review, doing any benchmarks with motherboards is worthless. You only do them to make sure that the engineers did not royally mess up on the design.

Nice review.
How I wish I could get my CPU that high

I purchased this motherboard several months ago for its hardware support. I still have some IDE hardware I want to use and because I still use Windows XP its nice to have an internal floppy to load drivers as an alternative to a custom Windows XP installation. I also like how the motherboard supports PCIe two 16X at 16X along with several other PCIe connectors and a couple of PCI connectors. Other features that attracted me to the motherboard include its USB3, SATA3, eSATA and firewire support.

I received the motherboard free of defects to the best of my knowledge at this point but I have some reservations about the motherboards BIOS.

1) I am using an NEC 3520A IDE DVD/CD drive and some of my DVD/CD software either malfunctions or does not work at all. In an effort to resolve the problems with it I clean install Windows XP the operating system I have used with the software for years and that did not resolve the problem. I also tried another IDE drive before purchasing a SATA DVD/CD drive and I tried the new SATA drive on both the AMD and Marvell SATA 3 controllers but that did not resolve the problem either. In looking in the BIOS the DVD/CD drive is only listed under boot devices and there is no sub menu to set block data, PIO mode and DMA mode like with every other motherboard I have owned. While this is usually set to automatic in most cases I assume other motherboards provide Windows or the software installed on it information that is not being provided with this IDE controller on this motherboard and I assume it has been removed from SATA technology in general and that's why the SATA controllers didn't work either with the software. In looking in the device manager in Windows XP I did not see any drivers for the IDE controller like with most motherboards. All the drivers are provided by Windows.

2) With this motherboard you can only have one hard drive device in the boot priory along with a DVD/CD drive and floppy. As a result you cannot set the boot priority with multiple hard drive devices so if you remove the first in the list it will boot on the next in line then if put the first that was in the list back in the computer will boot from it without having to revisit the BIOS. I have some backup software I run from flash drives and I have to visit the BIOS coming and going with this motherboard unlike with a couple of other motherboards I have.

3) Under Storage Devices if you disable the 1394EE you disable the IDE. It would be nice if these were separated.

Otherwise so far I would recommend this motherboard.

Sincerely,
Markh