ASRock X58 Extreme LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: Had this mother board for going on 3 years and have not had a single problem with it. Have been running a core i7 920 overclocked to 4GHz and 2x ATI Radeon 6770's in Crossfire for that entire time, and the board has handled it flawlessly.

Cons: None, it's worked without fault and works with all the components I chose.

Pros: When it works, its a good motherboard for what I paid back in July of 2010.

Cons: It has one nasty problem that makes this board a big miss for me.

It doesn't always post. Sometimes I have to reset it two or three times to get it to post. Other times I have to physically unplug the power cable from the power supply and wait about 15 min or so.

I can then plug it back in and get it to wait but this is extremely annoying! I don't have any other problems with the board like memory issues or my LAN disappearing but honestly I get so frustrated with the fact that I don't know if or not my machine is going to post!

Makes tinkering / overclocking just about impossible. Which is sad because my core i7 930 has plenty left in the tank from stock. Thankfully its fast enough for me without OCing.

Wish I wouldn't have ever bought this thing! The best thing I can say about it is that it still functions over two years later, when I can get it to post!

That's more then a lot of people can say

Other Thoughts: I'm pretty sure this got the TOMS HARDWARE stamp of approval, something I put a lot of faith into. They messed up when they decided to back this board. If they really did give it the approval. I'm pretty sure they did.

Pros: At the time that I bought it two years ago, it was one of the few boards that fit all of the specs that I wanted. There are many that are suitable now. There is an LED display that shows any errors that it has. You will need this.

Cons: In the slightly less than two years that I have owned these boards, I have gone through three and am now waiting on the fourth. The first one that I got was DOA. The replacement worked, but had over a dozen errors that had to be sorted through as well as a few BIOS changes that had to be made. This one lasted for about a year and a half before it suddenly stopped working. Since the warranty was long gone, I just ordered the same one again hoping that my problems had been resolved since the last time I bought one. Nope. The newest one had nearly two dozen errors when it was first installed. I got it to work for a few weeks. Then it started to shutdown after 15 seconds. I took it in to the computer shop. They told me that the motherboard was worthless. I contacted Newegg for a refund. Of course my warranty was over by nine days so my only option was to get another one of these wonderful boards as a replacement. I am not looking forward to the replacement getting here.....

Other Thoughts: Save your time and frustration and find another board.

Pros: This board worked well and has plenty of ports for just about anything I could want.

Cons: I bought this board in April 2011, and it failed in the beginning of November. For the price, I would expect a bit more longevity.

Other Thoughts: I now need to RMA it, but I don't have a copy of the original invoice, so that may be impossible.

Pros: Alright, bought this board for a modest work station/gaming rig. So far has worked very well in the set up I'm using, though I did perhaps go a bit further than the average builder might, see other thoughts.

This board supported my low power, 6 core Xeon L5640 right out of the box, and easily overclocked it to a modest 3.06ghz, @ 1.2vCore staying well within the rated power envelope of the CPU. It was also able to OC my 1333mhz memory to 1440mhz, with timings to the tune of 8-8-8-21 1T, so not bad at all. (For reference, memory is generic ECC hynix modules, 3x2gb)

Cons: There are a few caveats, not really cons though but I'll list them here anyway.

If you overclock, the board features a boot gaurd feature, which will reset your bios to defaults in the case of bad settings that won't let the board post. This in and of itself is not a con, and works as intended. However, once you reach a known stable overclock and are happy with your settings, make sure to save those settings in an OC profile, and make that the default, then disable the boot guard feature.

I say this, because if you don't own a UPS and your power flickers, it will be interpreted by the bios safeguard as a boot failure and your settings will be reset to defaults.

As well, there is of course no USB 3.0 or Sata 6gb/s. But, the lack of these features is clearly evident in the description, so there is no reason to dock any eggs for that.

Other Thoughts: Alright, here is the real reason I took the time to write this. Before I bought this board, I took the time to read through the reviews here, and took note of the common issues people were encountering with this board, namely the short lifespan, or unreliability of the board under load. More than a few reviewers pointed to poor quality thermal compound on the heatsinks for the chipset and VRM. So, to help mitigate the gamble I made when I bought the board, the very first thing I did was when I received it was to remove the heatsinks and scrape off the factory original thermal compound (which was applied unevenly, or not at all in some places) and replace it with Artic Silver Ceramique compound. Once set I then proceeded with the build and this board has been rock solid ever since, with very low temps all across the board.

Pros: Well, when it works, it work okay. The price is good for an i7 board. External CMOS reset switch is nice.

Cons: Well, received the motherboard and installed it. It posted, so I went into BIOS to make some configurations and then the motherboard shuts off. Restart, posts, then shuts off. Checked all connections and everything was good. I RMA the board and Newegg tells me that they won't honor it because there are bent CPU pins, and they are sending the motherboard back. I argue with them to no avail, and receive my broken motherboard back. I check the CPU pins and they are fine, so I get on the phone again with Newegg and finally convince them to RMA the thing again. Finally, after all this trouble, I receive a working motherboard. This one has worked well for 4 months, but the future has me a bit worried.

Other Thoughts: Not worth the risk. Look at the number of 1 star reviews...don't be fooled by the 4 star average. Spend the extra money and get something decent.

Pros: This board has no problems overclocking or flashing the bios to update. I use a USB stick to flash the bios. It's super easy! Asrock always updates this board with a new bios on there site even today to improve or fix or update support for future cpu's. What other company would support there own motherboard for years? I had this board for almost two years now with no problems! It even has support for the new six core i7 cpus.

Cons: None....well if you call it a con it has no 3.0 USB ports or 6.0 sata ports.

Other Thoughts: This is the best X58 board out there. Don't spend more money for a more expensive board. Look at the specs and compare it and I bet you can't find a better board. This board has a ton of features in the bios to mess with. Overclocks everything with no problems or errors! I will be buying from Asrock in the future!

Check out my overclocks that I have been running for almost two years. The ram is new even though this board had no problems with my old 6GB of Crucial ram which was overclocked to 7-7-6-24 1T @1.7v:

MOTHERBOARD: ASRock X58 Extreme

RAM: Gskill Sniper DDR3 12GB (3x4) 8-8-7-24 1T @1600Mhz 1.59v

CPU: i7-920 OCed @3.2Ghz @1.23v VTT @1.340v

Buy it if your not concerned about 3.0 USB ports in which little to no devices use or sata 6.0 which HDD's do use right now but is so little of a difference you will not see with normal mechanical drives. A++ Board!

Pros: Has a nice BIOS interface, neatly designed and from the appearance well organized and somewhat spacious. Power buttons are nice and manual's not bad.

Cons: About 1 week in, my computer wouldn't boot half the time. I would be forced to wait and try again an hour later. Now, there's nothing, no LED light, nothing. All the other parts have been tested so I'm gonna need to RMA it.

Pros: Nice while it worked.

Cons: It stopped working.

Pros: I've had this board for about 1 1/2 years now and It's be great, never RMA'd or anything. Has great features and cheap for the features.

Cons: It's now 2011, and with the new USB/SATA it's about time for me to upgrade to a new board, as this one does not USB3 and I bought a new case just waiting to get a use out of em.

Hard as heck to find the Realtek ALC890 drivers! I gave up looking at the realtek website and decided to download them from Asrock, hopefully they are not too out of date.

Other Thoughts: Great buy for a hardcore gamer on a budget!