ASRock 970 EXTREME3 AM3+ AMD 970 + SB950 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard

Pros: Sale price was good,though a few days later was lower still. Board layout is good. Plenty of room around the CPU for large fan without getting close to the memory sockets. Supports up to 32GB of ram. Has plenty of fan connections. USB ports are plentiful, and USB 3.0 is a definite plus. Has nice placement of the SATA III ports and an eSATA III port is great. Onboard sound is fantastic. Quality of components used on the board is above average and right along with the two "big" companies. BIOS is great to work with.

Cons: As others have stated, the motherboard is a little more flexible that it should be. Taking a measurement on the board, it's about 1 mil thinner than the two other major brands. This is a definite issue that ASRock needs to address as it wouldn't cost that much to fix, and would probably stop a lot of the no boot out of the box failures. Some solder points on the bottom of the board need to be smaller. These "sloppy" solder points along with the board flex can cause ground outs if you are not careful in installing the board and components. Anyone putting this board should realize that you have to install the CPU and Fan before you put it into the case. This is something that most people who overclock do anyway. Why take a risk in damaging your board?

Overall Review: I needed to upgrade one of my builds and I was looking at this motheboard when it came on sale. Despite the people griping about certain things, I figured it couldn't be any worse than some other motherboards I have used over the many years I've been doing this, and I was right. The first thing I noticed in the box was that the protective anti static bag is much to thin and not padded. The motherboard needs to have more padding around it in the box to keep it from moving around so much. When I took this motherboard out of the bad, I noticed a definite slight warp on the board around the VGA slot. This was due to the lack of padding/support in the box and the thinner than normal motherboard itself. With a few of those "sloppy" type solder joints on the bottom of the board, this flex is probably causing some of these boards to ground out in the cases they are being installed in. As per my usual customer, I did a test assembling the board on an antistatic mat, witht processor, fan, and memory installed along with a video card. Everything booted and worked fine. Leaving the memory and CPU and it's cooler installed on the motherboard, I then put it in the case and did the full assembly. When done it fired up just fine and has been running ever since. For those complaining about the board being shorter than an ATX board, you better think again. This board has the same footprint as my two other ATX machines and has the same overhang in the back behind the memory slots and SATA connectors. If everyone would notice that at those corners of this motherboard, there are two holes. These do not match up with holes in an ATX case, BUT if you can find a supplier of case mounting parts, there is a small plastic mounting pin that is available to use in these holes. The mounting pin I am thinking about has a spike that fits up through these holes, and has a threaded shank on the bottom which will screw into a hole in the case. Since there is no case hole, use a knife and cut the threaded shank off. The base of this mounting pin will support the board on the corners without flexing the board. I have had to do this for years on ATX motherboard builds, so this ain't nothing new. You can use your fingers to support under the 24 pin ATX power connector when you install it..NOT a big deal. All in all, this board has been solid. It runs cool. The BIOS is great. It overclocks well, and has been rock solid. A definite 4 Egger, only taking off for the board being a little on the thin side. This Build: ASRock 970 Extreme 3 AMD Phenom II X 4 BE 965 @ 3.6Ghz on air G-Skill Ares DDR3-1600 16GB Corsair 240GB SSD boot drive Samsung SATA III 2TB backup drive MSI Radeon HD7770 GHZ Edition video card MassCool 120mm Fans X 3 Lite On iHBS112-04 BluRay Burners X 2 Nippon Laps card reader with USB and eSATA port Apex Vortex Case hec X-Power Pro 650Watt PSU

Pros: Motherboard works fine if you use a currently-supported CPU.

Cons: This motherboard about a year ago had advertised support from ASRock for high-end FX CPUs, including the FX-8350. Support was later (sneakily) removed by ASRock.

Overall Review: It's obvious ASRock doesn't test their motherboards properly. Don't even think about trying to have a smooth RMA process with them either; expect long delays, and even expect them to waste your time by shipping you the wrong motherboard. So on-top of falsely-claiming hardware support, ASRock won't (easily, if at all) replace your hardware either. Almost feel bad for people who initially bought this board and paired it with a high-end FX CPU expecting it to work right. This motherboard is discontinued, so buying it isn't an issue anymore, but I would recommend staying away from ASRock entirely. Either that, or hope you never have to take advantage of their RMA.

Pros: Features I needed on my favorite board brand at a great price. Even though the case I put it in doesn't show it off, I like the black components & I/O Shield. Also, throwing in an angle SATA cable was a nice touch. Updating BIOS was super easy.

Cons: No ASRock case badge to show off the brand =(

Overall Review: I like the black I/O shield, but it didn't matter on the case I put it in. It would have been awesome for the NZXT Vulcan build I did a while back. Of course, I would have to have used one of ASRock's MATX offerings for that case. This was a fairly straightforward build with an SSD system drive, 7200RPM secondary/data drive, DVD-RW & Video Card. I implemented a X2 555 Black Edition that I knew unlocked to 4 cores and this board didn't even blink. Stable all the way around with Win 7 x64. 5 eggs for meeting all of my needs well, and just being ASRock.

Pros: UEFI Bios No need to update bios for new FX CPU's Great Feature Set Solid Performance even after 24hour BurnIn testing. Very pleased.

Cons: None so far. Perhaps the SATA controller isn't as fast as expected? Will explain below. I don't think its the motherboards fault.

Overall Review: While bench marking with the Mushkin Chronos Enhanced 60GB SSD for my client, it would not post a speed higher than 205MB/s Read & 60MB write. AS SSD & CrystalDiskMark both state the same results. So I'm unsure if its the SATA controller or the Chronos not living up to expectations. Despite that, the system still boots in 30seconds. System Specs are as follows: AMD FX4170 4.2Ghz Quad Core CPU GSkill 8GB DDR3 1600Mhz Memory Mushkin Chronos 60GB SSD Seagate Barracuda 250GB HDD Sapphire Radeon 6450 Flex Video Card Ultra LSP450 450W Power Supply Client is quite pleased.... solid build. Thanks ASRock!!

Pros: Has many functions at a low price, has some cool soft with it

Cons: Not for the FX 8150 cpu, fragile board. Plenty of overclocking features that can't be used due to poor VRM and mosfet cooling. Do not buy this board unless you are happy with running your system at stock, waste of money.

Overall Review: This is an update to my previous review. This board is horrible. You will not be able to overclock a FX 8150 cpu with it. VRM and mosfet temps have bad cooling and overheat causing cpu to throttle. This causes jerky game play in games like TF2. Placing extra fans on that area does jack.

Pros: Looks freakin sweet, things are basically where they should be.The board so far for 2 days has been very stable.Asrock instant boot actually workks as intended compared to the asrock board I replaced. Unlocked phenomii x2 550 to x4 no problems running stable at 3.7ghz.Yes , I won the unlocked core lottery this time! First mobo with a UEFI bios for me , didn;t get too excited until I actually used it , I never wanna go back to old style now, not sure if all UEFI bios are like this , but it makes the old style feel well, old.

Cons: I had an issue getting into the UEFI bios for the first time after bootup , solved the problem by changing desktop resolution to 1280x1024 , loading into the bios making necessary changes , then changing desktop back to native.I have experienced no problems since doing this. RAM DDR31600 , in the recommended slots in the handbook stopped finctioning in dual channel mode , installed them in the other 2 dual channel slots and everything is fine and stable at 1600 speeds and timings.

Overall Review: I set the ram to DDR31600 by overclocking the FSB to 240 , which for me resulted in an overclock of 3.72 GHZ.Memory is G-skill sniper DDR31600 9-9-9-24@1.5 volts.CPU voltage was notched up by .10 and CPU-NB voltage was notched up by .10.This puts the board into a better environment for ddr1600. Tests have shown on older phenoms that raising the HT link above 2000mhz has no real appreciable gain but can cause instability issues overwhelming the CPU-RAM bus.So if you do this method to result in DDR31600 , do the overclock and very slight voltage bumps hen reconfigure the HTlink by changing its ratio (HT link default ratio is x10) by changing this ratio to x9 at 240 fsb it has resulted in a slightly overclocked HTlink of 2160 mhz keeping within tolerances. Waiting on AMD to get their heads out of their ass3s and make a true "bulldozer" without idiotic latency issues and single-thread performance loss over OLDER AMD CPUS.I have the socket AMD , I'm waiting for you to fill it with aweso

Pros: I used this board in my kids computer build which didn’t need to be expensive or high end. Had a spare AMD AM3 Phenom II 965 lying around but wanted to be able to upgrade to FX chip later. Capable of 32 GB of ram, but that’s overkill so went with 8GB on Sale. Also picked up WD AV3200 320 GB HD that does 6GB/sec with 32mb cache on sale so boot time is actually pretty quick. AMD 970 North Bridge means 1 PCIe x16, so a cheap video card for now that can be upgraded later if needed to a high end card. ASRock actually left a space below the PCIe 2.0 x16 slot open, I’m guessing because so many video cards take up 2 slots. What a great idea! No paying for slots that are blocked. Nice black color instead of stupid powder blue. I’m so sick of powder blue! Oh yeah and there's X-Fast, but I haven't used it.

Cons: Not a full width board so it doesn’t use the 3 ATX standoffs near the drive bays on my ATX mid tower case. There is some flexing when you install the 20+4 pin power cable, but if you don’t know how to stick your finger between the board and the case tray during installation to stop this, you should be ejected from the planet. There are no lights on the board indicating power and no power button on the board, so there is no pre assembling and powering up this board without the use of a case power button (like you see in the computer building video on this site). The board labeling is adequate, but the front panel pins could be a little more distinguishable and labeled better. It doesn’t matter though as long as you find them and get it right. The case speaker pins have their own row, so just be aware. The second PCIe 2.0 slot is x4 because of the 970 NB chip so it’s capable of CrossfireX, but why would you do that? If you want a gaming rig just get 1 high end vid card and call it a day.

Overall Review: This is not my first computer build however this is the first time I've used ASRock. I usually use a more expensive brand. I bought all build parts for less than $420 which can easily be turned into a high performance gaming rig with minimal additional cost by upgrading the video card. Thank you ASRock for keeping cost down and performance up! Haven’t tried X-Fast yet, but if the three X-Fast options work even half as good as they sound and this board lasts, ASRock will be my brand of choice!

Pros: This thing is surprisingly full-featured for the price. Crossfire capable (see my Other Thoughts), a GUI based, full-featured BIOS, nice placement of ports, etc. The overclock software in the BIOS allowed me to overclock my 6 core 2.6GHz Thuban to 3.5GHz on air and a stock AMD cooler. Remember, though: patience and baby steps are a virtue when it comes to overclocking. This motherboard is a steal for the money. I am extremely pleased with this motherboard and its potential upgrade path. AMD may not be the speed king, but it offers great potential to keep the cost of upgrades reasonable and extend the life of a good system base.

Cons: The opening POST screen takes way too long to proceed to booting, imo. Certainly not cause to take an egg away, as it could just be a setting in the BIOS I am not seeing. Also: didn't bring world peace when I installed it.

Overall Review: An earlier reviewer made mention of Crossfire @ 16x & 4x. The loss, according to a few benchmarks I have seen, is negligible (in the 5% range). I am running two 1GB 4850's in this board and they are performing beautifully in Battlefield 3. Unless you are absolutely determined to squeeze every little bit of speed from your hardware, this board is a great buy.