ASRock 990FX Extreme9

[Daveburt714]

Just wondered if anyone has any experience with this board...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813157358

I need something decent for the bench, and my C5F is locked into the main rig (very stable and I'm not in the mood to pull it!).
I still have the C4F but it's a little flakey when it comes to PD/Vishera chips. Considering the 12+2 Digital PWM, Intel NIC, specs and styling I went ahead and ordered one tonight...
NewEgg had them on sale for $155 and just going by the specs it seemed like a pretty good deal.

I've never owned an ASRock board but a lot of folks seem to like them, so I thought I'd give it a shot (hope I won't be disappointed).

I'm still getting settled into the new house. The board should be here early next week, but I'm not sure I'll be ready for testing by then...
If anyone has any tips, experiences or opinions on this board feel free to post them here!

If not, I'll have some results in the next few weeks...

[xdan]

Well it has a validation at 8.5ghz so it seems to be good.
Many things implemented on Z77 OC Formula are also implemented on it.
If it was designed with same purpose as Oc Formula, overclocking, than i think it will be a nice motheboard.
The weak spot for Asrock could be memory, a little under Asus Rog motheboards.

[Zeus]

Dave, i have never been a fan of Asrock boards myself but i have owned the Z77 Formula board designed by Nik Shih and i have to say it was an absolute formidable board. What i'm trying to say is that Asrock is able to build some very good boards but you got to get the top of the line or else it won't be half as good.

I have been lookin at the Extreme 9 myself and found it to be a very impressive board. I don't think you will go far wrong with it.

[Fr3ak]

155$ is a killer price - go for it, try it and tell us how it went. The Extreme 3 was a terrible board that I can only recommend to anyone running stock settings, but with the Extreme 9 I am certain it will be a whole different story

[AMDforME]

The Extreme9 is essentially the 990 Fatality Pro with minor tweaks. The Fatality works fine with the FX processors so the E9 should be OK too.

[tbone8ty]

looking forward to the bench results on the extreme9 dave! looks like an excellent OC mobo for a good price

[AMDforME]

The E9 is a little cheaper than the similar Fatality Pro, so chose your mobo based on your PCI/PCIe, USB etc. socket and audio needs. Either mobo should have about the same OC'ing capabilities.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...157%2D358%2DTS

[xdan]

E9 it's much better at memory just compare 2100(Fatality) with 2450 Extreme9.

[AMDforME]

The 2400 MHz. is just the max officially supported frequency on the E9. It does not mean that your CPU/RAM can actually run at that frequency. People have run the Fatality Pro with RAM at 2400 MHz. also. The ability to run high RAM speeds depends mostly on the CPU IMC and the RAM, not the mobo, per se. Many mobos will run RAM above their official supported frequency and have this option available in the BIOS.

It helps RAM/mobo sales to list high supported RAM frequencies, even if these high frequencies don't show any significant improvement in system performance.

[Daveburt714]

I got this board on Tuesday, and although I have more important things to do I decided to set it up and play with it tonight...
Unfortunately I spent most of the time assembling the test bench I bought from NewEgg for $35 on sale (frikken jigsaw puzzle ).
Guess it's better than a pizza box, but because of that I didn't get to do much testing of the board.

A few things I can say is that the settup went pretty smooth and it comes with a lot of nice hardware. Including a 3.5" USB3 dual port face plate for your case that includes an SSD combo adapter so they'll both fit in the same slot. It also has a nice looking 3x Crossfire bridge, although I'll never use it, and a backplate that gives you two more USB3 ports (it has 2 USB3 headers onboard). As far as USB3 goes this thing is loaded!! With the 4 on the backplane and the 2 headers it gives you a total of 8 USB3's...

Nothing important as far as OC'ing (I'll get to that! ), but I thought the board looked a little chessy from the pics.
After having it in my hands my opinion changed... It's a nice looking board! Here's a pic:



I know there's not a lot of useful OC info here, but now that I've gotten it settup I'll be able to push the clocks this weekend...

The general feel is that it has some nice potential for a $155 board!

[Zeus]

Hey Dave, that looks like a very nice setup! I love that little benchtable you got there but it appears to me as being made of wood, is it? If it's made out of a durable material like plexi or something i'd say you got yourself a very nice little table, especially considering what you payed for it.

That board sure looks great and it has some very nice features, if it is anything like Asrock's Z77 Formula board designed by Nik Shih you ain't gonna regret it a single second. The Z77 board has a real weird UEFI with all sorts of spacey icons like stars, spaceships, sattelites and all sort of that spacey stuff, accompanied by some weird space soundeffects whenever you change some setting. Curious if this board has the same spacey theme for UEFI.

I'm looking forward to your OC results, maybe i'll have to work on my Cinebench 11.5 scores again? (please no! ) Good luck pushiong it buddy!

[xdan]

I don't see any picture

Anyway, i hope Dave thay you have some memory to do 2600, i'm curious if the board can do 2600 dual channel.

[Daveburt714]

Yeah, it's all plexi Zeus... That was the biggest part of the problem (pealing off the protective paper).
For the price it beats the pizza box though...

As for the UEFI, yep, it has the space theme. I get the feeling it's going to do quite well and in the OC department.
Time will tell I guess, Hopefully I'll have some results this weekend. After seeing your newest #'s, I think your CB11.5 is safe though...

[FlanK3r]

I don't see any picture

Anyway, i hope Dave thay you have some memory to do 2600, i'm curious if the board can do 2600 dual channel.

IL try it with "older" C5F at weekend.

[Daveburt714]

Anyway, i hope Dave thay you have some memory to do 2600, i'm curious if the board can do 2600 dual channel.

Sorry I missed your post.... I don't have any mem capable of those clocks.
The fastest stuff I have is some G.Skill RipX that will do ~2270 stable.

[xdan]

Too bad, it's just exact what i was interested into. But you can tell me the the bios have multipliers above 2400?
With a Sabertooth 990FX rev., i have memory divider at 2400. The board can do stable 2400Mhz at memory(even memtest), but above 2460 stops to works dual channel.

[Zeus]

My Crosshair V Formula-Z doesn't have multi's above 2400. I'm running 2400 9-11-11-25 for daily use. Pronblem is that you can't run CPU-NB lower than your ramspeed so if you want to run DDR2600 you need to have your CPU-NB at at least 2600MHz as well.

Last time i tried that wasn't stable for me even though i know my ram can do DDR2600 as it's rated for that.

I have to look more in depth soon and try to stabilize it, last chip i tried wasn't fully stable at 2600MHz CPU-NB i think, that might have been the reason.

[xdan]

Pronblem is that you can't run CPU-NB lower than your ramspeed so if you want to run DDR2600 you need to have your CPU-NB at at least 2600MHz as well

This is another interesting subject.
A friend has an 8350 which can do 2600NB with 1.25v NB. But that with memory at 2133.
Not sure it having memory at 2600 same time can't change the situation.
Mine must raise up to 1.4v to make Super Pi 32M stable, short time benching.
At 2400 NB/Memory i need 1.325v NB to be fully stable.

[FlanK3r]

I got something about 2500 MHz in hyperpi16M with FX-8350. I can try higher.

[NEOAethyr]

I've been seeing that alot, so maybe it's true they have a hard time even getting to 3ghz nb.
Is it really true you guys, you can't get much past 2500mhz nb?
I run mine 3ghz 24/7, the 1090t anyways.

Hopefully we'll get a new cpu very soon.
Even if I'm not interested in the cpu after I check out the reviews and such, I'm still interested in a new generation of boards.
That's only if they come out with the 1090fx chipset, I want that 8 port onboard sata (currently 6port + an extra controller chip on some boards).

What about this extreme9 board?
Is it any better then the asus?
It's probably cheaper but I'm mainly interested if it's better or not.

[Daveburt714]

OK... I did get a few hours of testing in this weekend.

Not sure how useful this will be to the hardcore (cold) folks, but for the ambient air/water crowd I'm pretty pleased with the Ex9...
I've had a couple of budget FX9xx boards. The GBT 990FXA UD3 (rev1) and an Asus M5A97 R2.0.
This board is only slightly more expensive and has features out the wazoo (8x USB3/8x Sata3/Intel NIC, a decent PWR section (12+2?) and serious PCI-e CFX/SLI slots).

I tested both those other boards using my ghetto (cold air assisted) WC and neither of them felt as solid, or clocked as good as this one!
The setup is the same as shown above (air) with ambient temps ~72f. The 8350 used is mediocre and had a hard time running stable @ 4.7 with custom watercooling, so these results are impressive to me...



The bios is still a little raw (new board) and has it's quirks, but if someone asked me for a recommendation on a board for ~$150 I wouldn't hesitate to say the ASRock Ex9!

BTW: Those settings were stable for 15 minutes P95 Blend. I hope someone does some cold testing and pushes this board. I get the feeling it would do really well!

[AMDforME]

The Extreme9 and Fatality Pro are very similar and typically $20 diff in price. Either should work fine for decent overclocking. My FX-8350 @ 4.7 GHz. will Prime 95 for as long as I want to run it. I've done numerous 25+ hour stints so these are pretty decent mobos and priced reasonable compared to the absurd prices Asus charges.

[MacClipper]

DDR3-2400 easily achieved on the newer BIOS (P1.30B beta) using Corsair Vengeance Pro 2133 sticks
http://valid.canardpc.com/2873475

[Daveburt714]

Had a major scare with this board a couple days ago!

I was flashing the 1.40 bios, did everything right (including default bios settings), but the rig hung during the flash.
After ~30 minutes I powered the system down and the machine wouldn't post again, and kept showing "F2" on the post LED...
I really thought I might have bricked the board!

After searching the manual, I found a paragraph about "Crashless Bios" (similar to the Asus variant).
There wasn't a whole lot of info about using it, but after a little experimentation it was a pretty easy fix...

Here's what I did to get it up and running again:
1) Format a flash drive as "Fat32"
2) Put a valid Bios version in the root directory of the flash drive
3) Insert the drive in a USB 2.0 port on the backplane of the motherboard
4) Cold start the machine
From there it fixed itself!

Very simple fix really, but it had me scared when I saw the F2 code on the post LED!
Hopefully this may help someone else...

Thanks to MacClipper for offering assistance, and ASRock for having this feature on the board.

[zhadoom]

I'm testing a X6 1100T with 990FX Extreme 9 and found a weird bug.
The NB frequency multiplier works until 14x. If set 15x or higher the NB speed will be set to 2000 ( 10x200 ).
It shows the correct value at bios ( 15x, 16x etc ) but 10x in cpu-z and the performance at the tests is comparable to 2GHz NB frequency.

Anyone suffer from the same problem ?