Closer Look
Despite the “Extreme6” name, the A85X looks aren’t all that extreme, it’s actually quite sleek. It sports a dark brown PCB, black RAM and PCI/PCI-E slots, gold caps, and black and silver heatsinks. The four RAM slots operate natively at 1866 and can overclock up to 2600MHz.
The large heatsinks and gold capacitors should help to ensure stable power and long life.
In the bottom right hand corner on the board we have a small display that can tell us of any errors with the motherboard as well as a very handy power and reset button. These are features that you generally only find on high-end overclocking boards and are useful when working with the system outside of a case.
The A85X gives us lots of expandability options with 2 PCI-E 1x, 2 PCI, and 3 PCI-E 16x/8x slots. Unfortunately only the top slot runs at 16x, with the first and second running at 8x when two cards are installed, and the third slot able to run at only 4x.
ASRock also included a 4-pin molex socket on the board to ensure the motherboard is getting plenty of power when running Crossfire.
The Extreme6 has a total of seven SATA 6GBps ports, with six located on the edge and one on the face of the board.
The rear I/O panel has just about every connection you could need with a VGA, DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort for the onboard graphics, 2 USB 2.0, 4 USB 3.0, 1 eSATA, 1 ethernet, 1 PS/2, a bank of HD audio ports, and a button to clear the BIOS. The clear CMOS button is especially useful when overclocking when you push things a little too far and the system won’t boot.
UEFI
The UEFI on the Extreme6 is very simple to use and nice to look at as well. Information is easy to find and the overall layout is logical and not difficult to navigate.
Every setting is easily adjustable which is just what you need for overclocking. Also, my RAM’s XMP profile was loaded on the first boot and required no tweaking or adjusting settings, which just makes my life a little easier. Overall the UEFI just gave me no issues which is exactly how it should be.
reviewer, you need to post your specs for test rig…unless icant find it