Here are some of the first press shots of ASRock's elusive X79 Extreme7, which we broke to the world last month with a teaser picture. The pictures reveal a beast that more or less meets our expectations from a high-end socket LGA2011 motherboard, and confirms much of the feature-set we guesstimated with the help of that teaser pic.
You've got to hand it to ASRock, they've managed to give this board the right amount of high-end "polish" to woo enthusiasts with even the deepest pockets. The X79 Extreme7 has a bustling landscape. Power is delivered to the CPU using a 16-phase VRM that uses high-grade chokes and Poscap capacitors. The memory looks to be powered by a 4-phase VRM arranged in sets of two on either sides of the socket.
An oddity here is ASRock's choice of six DDR3 DIMM slots for a platform with four memory channels. Among channels A, B, C, and D, channels B and D have two DIMM slots. So users with four memory modules to spare should populate the six slots as "1-0-1---1-0-1", in which the middle slot in each of the two sets of DIMM slots is left blank. Assuming this board supports 16 GB module densities, a total of 96 GB of memory is supported.
Expansion slots include five PCI-Express x16, among which two are electrical Gen. 3.0 x16 capable, four are Gen 3.0 x8 capable, and one is Gen 2.0 x4 capable, depending on how the slots are populated with add-on cards. ASRock didn't leave out legacy PCI, in case you don't want to let go of your awesome PCI sound card such as the X-meridean or X-Fi Elite Pro.
The board uses UEFI firmware. We expect the setup program to be rich in overclocking options that take advantage of the awesome (on paper) VRM deployed on this board.
The ASRock X79 Extreme7 is expected to be a part of the company's first wave of socket LGA2011 motherboards, due for November 2011.
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