 Now as some of you have probably noticed, my personal project has been on hold for a while. In fact, Slick pointed out to me that in the entire time he's been working with me, my personal rig has been sitting in this mess on this test bench, which is obviously devastating for all of us. So I may have the solution to the problem that has stymied me. So there's only so many x79 boards in the world. This one's ugly. That one coil winds when transferring over the network, even if I have an add-in card. This one is XLATX, so it doesn't fit in my TJ07 case. Ah yes, there, that's the gigabyte one in there, you can't see it. And this one, this one's funny because this one coil winds when it's under a light load. So I'm going to actually do something a little different. I'm going to put my camera here, sitting next to the CPU socket, and I'm going to walk away, oh no no, I have to show you the SS first, so check this out, check this out. So Prime95, oh come on, focus please. Thank you, come on, there you go, whatever. Prime95 is here, running right now. No coil wind. Normally coil wind, and if you guys don't know what coil wind sounds like, you're about to find out, so normally coil wind shows up worst when you're under an intensive load. So okay, listen, listen, listen, ready, and I'm going to stop the torture test and you're going to hear it kick in. Isn't that obnoxious? So since I'm aiming to build a silent water-cooled machine, obviously I don't want it making little eeeeeee, whining noises next to me. I'm really hoping that this board will be the solution to my problem. Rampage 4 Extreme isn't going to do it for me because it's a blue and black themed build, and with a gold accent. So the ASRock Extreme board, the Extreme 11, really caught my eye because it has gold caps, it's an all black board. The one thing that really bothers me about it right off the bat is this fan right here, but I'm going to see if there's anything I can do about that. A few other cool things about this board are the fact that it has 7 DIMM slots with 2 PLX chips so it's capable of running 16888888 bandwidth. Insane right? It also has 8 DIMM slots and it's a standard ATX form factor board, so what I'm hoping is that when I swap this into my test bench there, I'm not going to run into any coil wind otherwise I'm still not going to know what to do with my system build. Okay, board swap is complete, it's moment of truth time. Does the ASRock Extreme 11 whine like a little girl or is it going to allow me to build a silent water-cooled X79 machine? Okay, that's fans for now. Just keep an eye on this fan right here because if that turns up very high then that's going to be a big problem for me. As long as it runs at a nice low RPM or maybe doesn't turn on at all unless it's needed. Well that might be the smartest thing I ever did see. It's posted. That's always a good sign. You know what, why don't I wait until I get into Windows and then I'll update you guys. Okay, now it's time for the real moment of truth. Let's try a high CPU load so I'm going to run Prime95 small FF team and leave the camera right where I did before. And you guys can find out with me. Useful stuff, Prime95 shortcut 2, here we go. Ready and now. Ooh, it sounds like we have a winner. Actually it sounds like nothing which is perfect. Let's try a blend test just to be sure. Oh, no, hold on. I'm going to try a blend test with more RAM usage. So let's go with like 15 gigs of RAM. Even if we hit it pretty hard with a blend, the ASRock Extreme 11 shrugs it off. Although as soon as we kick it into high load, you hear that noise that just started up? That little fan is going to go. And I wonder why it's doing that because it's cooling the chipset as well as, oh, I wonder if it did it because of heat. Whoa, that's running hot. A couple PLX chips down there. You know what, let's turn off the blend test and see what happens because that's going to be a deal breaker because I really doubt that I can find, let's see if it turns off, because I really doubt that I can find any kind of water block for this board. I just don't think that's going to happen. Wow, what a shame. So there you go, guys. The ASRock Extreme 11 wins the PWM award for not being loud, but loses the chipset cooling award for having a noisy little fan on the south bridge as we used to call them. So disappointing. Okay, so I still don't have a board. So I'll update you guys as soon as there's any kind of update. But for now, I'm going to throw the MSI back on here. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.