If red and black isn't your thing, you may have looked to ASRock to fulfil your motherboard needs. With their newly announced X99 Extreme 11, they really have taken extreme to the next level.
We all know X99 is for enthusiasts with some serious hardware and now, if you're a storage whore, you can enjoy a massive amount of storage with 18 SATA connections. Yes. 18. It's not a typo.
The rest of the board is also quite appealing. A LGA2011-3 socket wired to the X99 Express chipset and eight DDR4 DIMM slots for quad channel memory configurations makes this board a great competitor to the other X99 boards out there. ASRock has proven themselves when it comes to VRM design, especially with their Overclocking board series, and this one comes with a 12 phase VRM design. This matches the ASUS X99-A.
Look down the right hand side... Yes. They're all SATA ports!
There's also five PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots, which are wired through two PLX 8747 bridge chips to allow all four installed graphics cards to have access to 16 PCI-Express lanes each. To deliver extra power to the motherboard, there is also a 4-pin Molex connector near the rear I/O - Let's face it, fully loaded, this board needs the extra juice!
Of the 18 SATA ports, 10 are SATA3 ports from the Intel X99 Express chipset, while the other eight are SAS ports stemming from the LSI SAS 3008 controller, although you can hook up SATA 3 drives to these without issue. Thankfully, they're all angled to the side so they're easy enough to access.
If that still isn't enough for you, this bad boy has two Ultra M.2 slots, which are fed by 4 PCI-Express 3.0 lanes.
Of course there are also ample I/O ports on the rear, consisting of:
This is an E-ATX board so, not only will you need to find a case to home this monster, but you'll also need to consider which cases can actually hold that many drives.
There's no pricing as of yet, but I'm guessing it will be seriously competitive with ASUS and probably be a little bit cheaper. This could be the 'value' way to get into an X99 build. Even so, it's still serious hardware for serious builders.
Source Tom's Hardware
We all know X99 is for enthusiasts with some serious hardware and now, if you're a storage whore, you can enjoy a massive amount of storage with 18 SATA connections. Yes. 18. It's not a typo.
The rest of the board is also quite appealing. A LGA2011-3 socket wired to the X99 Express chipset and eight DDR4 DIMM slots for quad channel memory configurations makes this board a great competitor to the other X99 boards out there. ASRock has proven themselves when it comes to VRM design, especially with their Overclocking board series, and this one comes with a 12 phase VRM design. This matches the ASUS X99-A.
Look down the right hand side... Yes. They're all SATA ports!
There's also five PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots, which are wired through two PLX 8747 bridge chips to allow all four installed graphics cards to have access to 16 PCI-Express lanes each. To deliver extra power to the motherboard, there is also a 4-pin Molex connector near the rear I/O - Let's face it, fully loaded, this board needs the extra juice!
Of the 18 SATA ports, 10 are SATA3 ports from the Intel X99 Express chipset, while the other eight are SAS ports stemming from the LSI SAS 3008 controller, although you can hook up SATA 3 drives to these without issue. Thankfully, they're all angled to the side so they're easy enough to access.
If that still isn't enough for you, this bad boy has two Ultra M.2 slots, which are fed by 4 PCI-Express 3.0 lanes.
Of course there are also ample I/O ports on the rear, consisting of:
- Four USB 2.0 ports
- Four USB 3.0 ports (with four more accessed on the front)
- Two eSATA ports
- a legacy PS/2 port
- Dual Intel Gigabit Ethernet
- 8 channel HD audio
This is an E-ATX board so, not only will you need to find a case to home this monster, but you'll also need to consider which cases can actually hold that many drives.
There's no pricing as of yet, but I'm guessing it will be seriously competitive with ASUS and probably be a little bit cheaper. This could be the 'value' way to get into an X99 build. Even so, it's still serious hardware for serious builders.
Source Tom's Hardware
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