ASROCK Extreme 6 or Gigabyte Gaming 7

[davidst95]

Hi, my friend is looking for a new Z97 motherboard. Which is a better board, the ASROCK Extreme 6 or Gigabyte Gaming 7? There's only about a $10 difference in price. Thanks.

The asrock has 12 phase voltage while the gigabyte has 8. I assume the asrock would be better at over clocking but I could be wrong.

David

 

[Evilsizer]

since the cpu has IVR, anything that high ie 12 is a waste. you need to look at the features of each board to see which one is better for your friends use. while the GB sports the m.2 connector and SATAe, so does the extreme 6, the extreme 6 sports a second m.2 connector being Ultra M.2 Gen3 x4.

i have been looking at both boards my self, if i ever get the chance to upgrade to a z97. For me it would be the Extreme 6 because of the Ultra m.2 connector. if your friend doesnt care about that, you may go GB. really tough choice IMO.

 

[davidst95]

Thanks for the reply. I was looking at the Extreme 6 and have my concerns about the second Ultra m.2. I don't want to say it's a gimmick but I think we are a generation away from Ultra m.2 drives to be in a reasonable price range. ASROCK is known to be the first to bring new technology to the market. The regular m.2 are just coming out and I believe they are still relatively high in price compared to a regular sata SSD. I guess you could do a SSD Raid 0 if you need the extra bandwidth although ultra m.2 is crazy fast at 32 GB/s.

Also, if you use the Ultra m.2 port you lose SLI according to their manual. ASRock uses PCI lanes for there m.2 connections while Gigabyte combines 2 sata ports to get the 10 GB/s bandwidth for there regular m.2 port.

I'm still not sure what board is better but that's what I found with my limited research. Thanks again for the reply.

EDIT:

I would like to say something positive about the ASROCK. I like it has a real Intel Ethernet port, an extra internal USB 3.0 header and having the ability to display higher resolutions in their ports for the integrated Intel GPU in case my friend doesn't want a discrete graphics card.