Being our first ASRock Sandy Bridge motherboard to come under the spotlight at Vortez, the Extreme4 Gen3 has had many stalwarts to contend with and a lot to live up to but how has it fared?

On a visual level the Extreme4 Gen3 is a masterpiece, delivering a stealthy, sleek and professional look to grace any enclosure. Black has been extremely popular option to go with for motherboards and combined with the gold solid CAPs this makes for a striking resemblance and an established brand image.

For consumers, ASRock have brought the support for PCI-E 3.0 – something many will appreciate since graphics cards that endorse this technology will soon be with us. Although PCI-E 3.0 isn’t available yet it’s great to see that ASRock are preparing for this and I am sure this will favour well in the consumers mind, as it will future-proof their purchase.

The Extreme4 Gen3 comes with a large portion of features that many enthusiasts will be thankful for. Features like onboard power switches/reset CMOS, LED debug, graphical UEFI and of course the expected features native to Intel Z68 like USB3.0, SATAIII (6Gbps), Intel Smart Response and video outputs via HDMI, DVI and VGA. The software packages included are extensive allowing you to overclock within Windows, charge popular devices such as your phone and other useful applications.


In terms of performance the Extreme4 Gen3 delivers on every level – be it processing power, memory bandwidth or encoding this motherboard battles it out with some of the big contenders using the Intel P67 chipset. In fact the Extreme4 Gen3 doesn’t only keep up with some of the premium offerings from ASUS and MSI but in some of the benchmarks it even toppled them. Compare the price of the Extreme4 Gen3 to those rivals and you have a great value for money motherboard on your hands.

Priced at approx. £140 inc. VAT (GBP) the Extreme4 Gen3 is without doubt a great value for money offering. At this kind of price-point you are looking at mainstream P67/Z68 motherboard land – in fact quite similar to that of the ASUS P8P67 and just take a look at how those two motherboards compare on the previous pages!

The bottom line is: ASRock have presented a masterpiece in the Extreme4 Gen3. It overclocks to 5GHz and beyond, delivers consistently great performance and comes at a price-tag that translates to great value for money.