ASRock X79 Extreme9 Motherboard Review

Over the last month or so a lot of focus has been placed on Intel's Ivy Bridge CPUs and the Z77 motherboards which support them. While a lot of this focus is warranted one thing that often gets lost in the mix is that these new CPUs, such as the i7-3770K are Intel's mid-high end chips and there is a whole tier of products above them.

CPUs like the i7-3960X sit at the top of Intel's product stack and if we are looking to build a top of the range system based around that CPU we need a quality board to maximise our features and performance. ASRock aim to deliver this with their X79 Extreme9 and today it is on our test bench as we put it through a selection of real world and synthetic tests. Can it offer as much as the newer Z77 boards, or maybe even more? Let's find out.