The ASRock X99 Extreme11 Review: Eighteen SATA Ports with Haswell-E
by Ian Cutress on March 11, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Storage
- ASRock
- X99
- LGA2011-3
The ASRock X99 Extreme11 Conclusion
There are particular areas of each electronics market that the general consumer doesn't see or might have difficulty understanding. If a general consumer is concerned primarily about cost, then seeing a market where money-is-no-object offers a strange perspective. Ultimately, the ASRock X99 Extreme11 is in one of these brackets. Most home users would agree that $600+ for a motherboard feels insane, but for the storage and compute markets to which it is focused, $600 can be a drop in the ocean of total system cost. It may even save a few $$$ if it has the required features already onboard.
The reason for the cost of the X99 Extreme11 stems from two PLX8747 PCIe 3.0 switches providing x16/x16/x16/x16 for four-way PCIe coprocessor action as well as an LSI 3008 SAS/SATA controller giving eight more storage ports. These eight ports combine with the ten from the chipset for a total of eighteen.
In the hierarchy of reasons to buy a motherboard, having a particular functionality rates high and it is the functionality that will cause users to buy the Extreme11, similar to the X99 WS-E/10G we reviewed previously. Alongside the to-buy features, the motherboard also comes with dual Intel network ports (I218-V and I211-AT), support for Intel Xeons and 128GB of RDIMMs and a boosted Realtek ALC1150 audio solution in the form of Purity Sound 2.
A key metric in our tests for such a board is power consumption, and given the extra components it perhaps comes as no surprise that under load the Extreme11 draws 244W at CPU load and comes in as nearly the most power hungry out of the X99 boards we have tested. The extra components pushes POST times nearer 25 seconds also. One surprising outcome was the PCH USB 3.0 speed, coming top in our test.
While the Extreme11 is not necessarily bought for performance, the base BIOS we tested with implemented a form of multi-core turbo, giving it high marks across almost all of our CPU suite. Overclocking performance on our mediocre CPU matched that of other X99 motherboards, with the range of automatic options providing suitable feedback to place a manual set of parameters.
In the past, I have always said that the first thing users consider when purchasing a motherboard is if it has a certain feature they need. (Next in the order of narrowing down the options, assuming no prior experience with a brand, is usually price, then looks, then performance, extras and support.) The ASRock X99 Extreme11 sits in that niche for users who want Haswell-E or Xeon E5 v3 as well as storage and multiple PCIe coprocessors - a niche with only few motherboardsin the self-build community, making the Extreme11 a straightforward option.
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jasica - Thursday, March 19, 2015 - link
as a professionally i agreed with duploxxx there are no reason to buy this board. because every one is not like gaming !<a href="http://www.topmediabox.com/">Real TV</a>
Native7i - Thursday, April 23, 2015 - link
I expected more USB ports at rear panelSaelnaydar - Friday, May 15, 2015 - link
Hello,Not all sorage ports are usable the way you want or the way you think, raids ports are only bound to one part of connectors.
If you are using SATA-M2 cards, the connectivity shares bandwith with some ports and you have to figure out what are unshared ports that supports raids
SSD should be bound to some special ports and not shared with M2, raids .. Wiring setup and nightmare...the storage part is not as easy at it sounds.
More importantly for a 700 Euro card !
The 3 Way SLI Does not work out of the box, a big drawback for a 4X16x 3.0 PCIE Motherboard with 2 build in chipsets supporting up to 4XSLI
I finaly made it to 3 ways SLI
First 3 way it was buggy and achieved lesser performance than 2 Way SLI
With a lot of cards switch and testings i finaly "as a last option" updated BIOS to 1.2 (wich was not there in january whan i bought the MB)
The Bios flash to 1.2 of my Asrock X99 Extreme 11 made work the 3 ways SLI configuration.
There was no indication on forums or in bios update or release notes that the bios was fixing SLI but IT does for me.
afbfxt - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
I promise this will be good and I guarantee you cant make this stuff up.The ASRock X99 Extreme11 advertizes itself as a MOBO that has 8 SAS-3 ports on it. However the SAS-3 ports are the same form factor as a seven-pin SATA connector. In the MOBO manual it states "For connecting SAS HDDs, please contact SAS data cable dealers" because ASRock does not include the SAS-3 cables necessary. So I contacted all the SAS-3 cable manufactures in the USA and they all said they have never heard of a SAS-3 cable that had a SFF-8482 connector on one end and a seven-pin SATA connector on the other end that supports 12 GB/s. So I e-mailed ASRock support and asked them if they knew where I could get a SAS-3 cable like this and they never responded. So I did a Google search to see if anyone was having the same problem and I found one other person that was. The whole reason why ASRock is charging over 600.00 dollars for this board is because it offers an LSI SAS 3008 SCSI controller on board but obviously it's completely useless, so they're just ripping you off.
At first I was extremely angry but after a few days I found this whole incident to be hilarious.
I mean, can you imagine a company doing something like this. LOL!!!!!!!!!
I would never buy anything from ASRock ever again and I don't recommend anybody buying anything from them either. I will stick with and recommend to others more reputable brands like ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI etc.
petar_b - Friday, January 29, 2016 - link
Did you try using regular SATA cable and power connector from your power supply ? You won't get far if you wish to use SFF-8482 ....afbfxt - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
I promise this will be good and I guarantee you cant make this stuff up.The ASRock X99 Extreme11 advertizes itself as a MOBO that has 8 SAS-3 ports on it. However the SAS-3 ports are the same form factor as a seven-pin SATA connector. In the MOBO manual it states "For connecting SAS HDDs, please contact SAS data cable dealers" because ASRock does not include the SAS-3 cables necessary. So I contacted all the SAS-3 cable manufactures in the USA and they all said they have never heard of a SAS-3 cable that had a SFF-8482 connector on one end and a seven-pin SATA connector on the other end that supports 12 GB/s. So I e-mailed ASRock support and asked them if they knew where I could get a SAS-3 cable like this and they never responded. So I did a Google search to see if anyone was having the same problem and I found one other person that was. The whole reason why ASRock is charging over 600.00 dollars for this board is because it offers an LSI SAS 3008 SCSI controller on board but obviously it's completely useless, so they're just ripping you off.
At first I was extremely angry but after a few days (and my RMA approval) I found this whole incident to be hilarious. I mean, can you imagine a company doing something like this. LOL!!!!!!!!!
I would never buy anything from ASRock ever again and I don't recommend anybody buying anything from them either. I will stick with and recommend to others more reputable brands like ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI etc.
petar_b - Friday, January 29, 2016 - link
No it's not rip off. each plx has price of 60 usd (you can find this on web), SAS controller that one would buy as PCIe card is aprox 300, meanis you pay 420 usd here just for good SAS implementation (meaning you need PLX or you can't run dual graphic card setup without PLX - don't forget that SAS takes 4 lanes).Yes board could be cheaper, but it's a product for narrow audience... they have to compensate. ASUS WS, Gigabyte also use PLX, you can see how prices increase rapidly when they provide PLXes ...
There is no way out wihout PLX if you want SAS and multi graphic card setup.
d_sing - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
Does anyone know if this board will support 8TB HDDs on all 18 ports at once? (i.e. 18 x 8TB = 144TB) Considering this board for a server build...