ASRock X58 Extreme6
Board Layout
First off, the immediate impression upon opening the package is the aesthetics of the board. The colour scheme here is very sharp looking, bordering on monochromatic since the PCB is entirely black, with components coloured in various hues of blue, accented by white. It’s quite pleasant, and not as "pastel-coloured" as a Gigabyte board, for example.
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A quick overview of the Extreme6 reveals the layout is very good, and definitely better than what we saw on the Extreme3. There is plenty of maneuvering room between component areas to work without worrying about stressing yourself in the process. We’ll discuss this soon in greater detail when we install some hardware components.
To the left of the upper CPU area is the 8-pin CPU power connector, unfortunately positioned well off the edge of the board which doesn’t help avoid cable management problems, particularly with bottom-mounted power supplies reaching the header with cables routed behind the motherboard tray. There is also cooling by means of the two primary heatsinks, both of which are passively cooled, unlike the active fan cooling we saw on the Extreme3.
To the right of the CPU area, we see the six DDR3 memory slots in triple channel configuration. At the top right of the board is the motherboard’s 24-pin power connector, which could pose a bit of difficulty with bottom-mounted power supply case designs. It could also pose space issues if you choose to use a fan on the memory modules; it may not fit or interfere with the 24-pin cable.
We see a PATA header here, and while users looking to re-use some old hardware may rejoice, we don’t think this inclusion is necessary since IDE is going the way of the dinosaur. If you’re an enthusiast looking to buy the Extreme6, we think a new SATA connection drive (optical or HDD) is well within the budget range anyways.
