ASRock has been hard pushing into the high-end motherboard market and contrary to many expectations the small Taiwanese company has been quite successful in this endeavor having gained the reputation of a trustworthy partner offering sturdy motherboards. The latest expression of these efforts is the ASRock Z77 Extreme 11 motherboard – which targets Intel’s Ivy Bridge processors and is here to take the place of the current flagship – the Z77 Extreme 9.
The new feature-rich motherboard will come in an EATX form factor and will support all LGA1155 processors. The CPU power delivery consists of 8 + 4 phase design with dual-stack MOSFETS and Digi Power with the motherboard getting power from a single 8-pin EPS power connector. The Z77 Extreme 11 offers four DDR3 DIMM slots for up to 32 GB of DDR3 memory running at 3000 MHz or above.
The motherboard will also offer four PCI Express x16 slots; three of which are PCI Express 3.0 complaint. It supports 3-way GPU configuration in x8/x8/x8 mode and 4-way GPU configuration in x8/x8/x8/x4 mode. It also has a mini-PCIe slot, which comes preloaded with a WiFi+BT card. The extra PCI Express lanes are provided by PLX’s PEX 8474 chip.
Four SATA II 3Gb/s ports and 10 SATA III 6Gb/s ports provide storage; eight of which are also complaint with SAS-2 standards. The SAS ports are provided by LSI SAS2308 PCIe 3.0 x8 controller, which also supports NCQ, hot plug and LSI MegaRAID utility. The motherboard has two USB 3.0 front panel headers (powered by Etron EJ188) supporting up to four USB 3.0 ports.
The rear panel of the Z77 Extreme 11 will come with eight USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, dual gigabit LAN (Intel 82579V and Intel 82583V), PS/2 port, HDMI port, optical SPDIF out, eSATA port, IEEE 1394 Port, clear CMOS switch and 7.1 channel HD audio jacks powered by Realtek ALC898. The motherboard also comes with all the usual ASRock features like UEFI, ASRock 555 and Dehumidifier.
A launch day has not been set as of now but the motherboard should hit the market soon. Expected pricing is around 400 – 450 USD.
Source: Chiploco.com