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Date added: 02/05/2012 Bit-Tech - ASRock X79 Extreme4 Review

ASRock’s motherboards have improved by leaps and bounds in recent years and the company has raised the bar of its enthusiast offerings yet again with its LGA2011 motherboard line-up. The X79 Extreme4 is one of two ASRock motherboards we've looked at recently, the other being the X79 Extreme4-M, which is a micro-ATX version of the board you see before you. At first glance it appears that the Extreme4 shares some aspects of its miniature sibling, namely the fact that it has only four DIMM sockets.

 This appears to be a major disadvantage, but quad-channel support is still present, and quad-channel memory kits currently consist of four sticks anyway. The likelihood is that you’ll end up with 16GB of RAM, which is enough for most tasks for the foreseeable future. If you think you’ll want to add a second 16GB kit at some point, you’ll need to buy a pricey 4 x 8GB kit, and it’s worth bearing in mind that both ASRock boards have a limit of 32GB too.

 The reduced DIMM socket count brings about one advantage though, which is that the Extreme 4 is significantly cheaper than the competition. The next most expensive example is the Asus P9X79 Pro, which costs £230. That’s £40 more than the Extreme4.

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