 Welcome to my unboxing and first look at the ASRock X79 Extreme 11 motherboard. This is pretty much as extreme as it gets. I mean, they took the dial from 1 to 10 and cranked it up to 11. So what's it got going for it? This I'm not that sold on. I don't think it has 5x the system speed with XFast RAM and I don't think the USB is 5x the speed of anyone else's USB 3, although it is 5x the speed of USB 2. I don't believe that their LAN is 5x the speed of anything. It's gigabit, which is either 10x, 10, 100, or it's the same as gigabit. But what it does have is support for Core i7 processors on the LGA2011 platform, SLI and Crossfire X compatibility, Windows 7 or Windows 8 compatibility. Any new board is going to be just fine with Windows 8. You've got dual PCIe3 PLX chips. Yes, it is that extreme. So this board is capable of running 4-way SLI and 4-way Crossfire at 16x, 16x, 16x, 16x. Yes, you heard me correctly. Four PCIe3 graphics cards at full 16x speed. Isn't that crazy? And because the board is all PCIe16x connectors, it can actually run at 16, 8, 8, 8, 8, 8, 8. I mean, if you were going to put like six RAID cards and a video card in a board, this would be the one. Okay, moving right along to some other things here before I explain why the packaging is all beat up. 24 plus two-phase power design with no coil line, by the way. I have already fired up this board and put it under load. Digital power, okay. 8x DDR3 2500 plus OC, although the forms indicate that it's kind of hard to do that unless you have like exactly the right Cherry Pick modules. And really it comes down to the CPU more than the board for things like 8-DIM high-speed memory operation. So bear that in mind. You've got to have a good memory controller on your CPU. Full stack MOSFETs. This is a new thing here. So the silicon die area is increased by stacking two dies into a MOSFET. Very cool stuff. 8 SATA3 slash SAS connectors from the LSI controller and creative onboard sound with Core 3D audio with premium headset amplifier. So yes, AMPed onboard sound, onboard SAS with an LSI controller. Not Marvell, not J Micron, nothing like that. LSI, like the real deal. Yeah, dual PCIe3 PLX chips. Those are expensive chips by the way. There's no other high-end board that uses more than one of them. And that's very high-end other boards. This is in terms of the actual cost to ASRock, probably the most expensive possible way to implement everything that they've done here. This is a premium board. No jokes. What else we got here? Premium gold caps. Yeah, they put gold on the caps just because. 8 by USB 3, 4 front, 4 back. Scout mode, hear the enemy. Okay, sure. Let's move right on. ASRock OMG, online management guard. Okay, internet flash. Oh, cool. Searches for available UEFI firmware updates from ASRock servers. Auto detect the latest BIOS from the servers and flash them within the UEFI setup without entering the Windows OS. That's cool. Easy raid installer, interactive UEFI with apparently music. Okay, yeah, visual BIOS, Broadcom dual LAN. Okay, that's unfortunate. I would have liked to see, although it does support teaming, I would have liked to see Intel LAN. However, it's got so many PCIe slots that you can install as many sort of add-in cards as you want. If you're going to spend $600 on a motherboard, I don't think the LAN card is that much of a stretch. So you've got a front USB 3, 3.5 inch adapter just in case you don't have that built into your case. Short, hard PCB SLI bridge. Another one. Three way SLI bridge. Oh wow. Simplicity is kind of my favorite thing ever. This is the best three way SLI bridge that I have ever seen. Nothing. No branding. Blank. Branding's here, which is good, but that is going to look so clean in your system. Love it. Six SATA 360 gigabit per second cables. Another hard bridge. Again, very clean. Nothing on the front of it. Here you can take this and install it in this and add additional back panel USB 3 if you don't want them in the front. Handy. Two Molex to SATA power connectors. That's random. If you don't have a power supply with SATA connectors on it and you're buying a $600 board, your priorities are wrong. I.O. shield color coded for convenience. Manual, manual. Okay, you got to be kidding me. Software setup guide. This is a quick installation guide. Download the latest drivers from the ASRock website. Don't use this. That's a novel, not a quick installation guide. That's a full manual, guys. Now let's have a look at the board and I will sort of quickly explain why it looks like this. This is my cat. I have already tried this board. I took it out so that I could test it for coil line because I'm looking for a new board for my personal rig. I was like super disappointed when I came back in the room and he had absolutely shredded the packaging for it. So hopefully that's not going to be a problem for me at any point in time. Also it was strapped in with these but I have already undone them. So it was zip tied in so that it's going to be totally safe in shipping. I'm actually really impressed with the way this board is packaged. No possibility for it to go anywhere. Nice soft foam. And this is the board. So a few things that are unique about this board. The engineering that goes into building something this extreme should not be understated because this is a standard ATX length board. It's an EATX and then it's a little bit longer but it's not fully to EATX either. So as long as you've got a decent case with a little bit of extra width, this board will fit. 8 dims, 7 PCI slots. Cannot emphasize that enough. Does not exist in a standard length board other than this one. No one else was able to do it and the fact that they had to put in dual PLX chips to get... So I mean no one else even did 16, 16, 16, 16, 111 or anything like that. Nobody did this and they had to build in additional chips in order to make it happen. And they have 8 plus 6 hard drive connections. So 2 SATA 3 6 gigabit per second ports off the Intel chipset. 4 SATA 2 3 gigabit per second ports off the Intel chipset. And 8 SAS 6 gigabit per second connections off the LSI chipset. These are mostly intended for storage guys. For your boot drive you should still be using the Intel controller. Alright post debug... Okay I'm getting distracted here because I'm like just awestruck by the board. There's your 24 phase power. Up there you can actually see 12 by 2 under this heatsink right here and then this is the one thing that I was not too thrilled about with this particular board. The fact that it does include a chipset fan. However, my understanding is some water cooling company somewhere might be working on a full board cooler for this board which would make it pretty much the perfect board for the extreme user because there's no electrical noise and once you get that fan off it should be completely silent with all of these connectivity options built into it. Alright dual 8 pin power connectors in the top left in their ideal locations. Lots of room around the CPU socket for large coolers, water blocks, whatever else the case may be. 8 DIMM slots which is unbelievable given that they've again squeezed it into this tiny form factor considering all... I mean look how dense the PCB is. Even the top corners. Yup put in everything you possibly can everywhere. Like here just do like a pen of like here down to the bottom. How much stuff is on this board? Like a lot of the time you look at premium products and you're like yeah there's really not that much stuff on it. Like what were they spending money on? And with this one there is actually no doubt that they spent a lot of money on it. Okay 24 pin power connectors in this ideal location along the right hand edge. Two USB 3.0 front panel connectors. They're not right angle but I'll forgive them again they're space constrained at some point I guess on something like this. Chipset, cooler, okay and for those of you who are suggesting on my blog channel that I just use a simple chipset water block I can't do that because there are four chips under there. See there's the screws. PLX, PLX. One of these is going to be south bridge and then one of them is going to be the LSI controller. This is probably the LSI controller would be my guess. Hold on where the trace is going. No that might be the south, yeah that's the LSI controller and that's the south bridge as they used to call them and they don't call them anymore but I still do because I'm old school like that. Onboard power connectors, post header or post readout. US print USB connectors. Auxiliary power is here and here so if you really did want to install four graphics cards I'd recommend using one or both of those to avoid burning out your 24 pin connector. You've got onboard firewire, onboard HD audio and there's your bigger cap for the onboard audio. A headphone amplifier. HD badge one. Looks kind of neat but I think the chip's actually under there, probably shielded in some way. Neat. Okay. Um, I think that pretty much covers it other than oh yeah it's got the sexiest color scheme ever. I wish it had a matte black PCB but since the PCB again is like so covered in stuff that you don't see it anyway this would have been just perfect for my build if I could get my hands on a chipset cooler for it that's not a fan. The fan actually doesn't turn on until the chipset gets hot but the chipset got hot pretty fast with all those chips under it so not to mention it's sharing cooling with this guy right here via this heat pipe and the power phases are bound to get pretty toasty as well. So let's have a look at what we've got. Oh right right right right hold on hold on fan connectors. One three pin, one four pin, one three pin, one three pin so that's a total of what three three pins, one four, okay another four pin, another three pin. Decent number of fan connectors not a ton though. And back panel connectors PS2 port yay still a must in my opinion eight USB 2.0 ports, clear CMOS, dual gigabit ethernet, firewire, four USB 3.0 ports, dual eSATA ports. It's like overkill much so that gives us a total of what was this six eight fourteen sixteen, sixteen SATA connections. Optical audio out and 5.1 audio with a mic input. Thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the ASRock Extreme 11 X79 motherboard. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.