Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

The ASRock OC Formula is a terrific build. It offers a wide range of features, is a fairly good overclocker and comes with interesting looks. I say interesting as I find the color scheme too much yellow, but that is a personal preference. No other then that it is a little beast armed with some really quality components, good audio, two Gigabit jacks, ten SATA ports and of course you have to like the two M.2. slots for which one even has a x4 PCIe link allowance of 32 Gbit/sec -- yeah that equals FAST! Add to that the RAW horsepower a Haswell-E platform delivers with the 6 and 8-core processor and DDR4 memory. Yeah, it’s cool stuff alright. Specs and features wise there is also very little to complain about. This motherboard can be an excellent infrastructure for your 2/3/4-way SLI or Crossfire build. The amount of USB 3.0 ports that are plentiful as well, and of course we need to mention the enhanced audio solution as well. Interesting to see is the preamp stuff for external DACs. I really do have to complement the audio features here, as over the standard Realtek codec used like two years ago, we now see huge improvement on both hard and software side that is way more appealing to the audiophile. 

The Platform Experience

The motherboard manufacturers simply went berserk with their motherboard designs, and I believe that 2014 has to be the best year of them all if you look at what the motherboard manufacturers did and now are offering. The overall per core performance remains seriously nice but is at the level of pretty much any previous Nehalem architecture based processor core, Turbo 2.0 kicks in nicely up-to 3.3 GHz per core for the Core i7 5960X. For the professional user who uses heavily threaded software like content creation, that's where Haswell-E will make nice difference. Added to that, quad-channel DDR4 memory will offer retarded bandwidth and plenty of PCIe lanes and you'll have a platform that will be hard to beat. The Intel X99 chipset is by all means a huge plus. With this release you receive huge amounts of SATA3 and USB 3.0 ports among others. The motherboard manufacturers have gone through great lengths and offer the most luxurious products. It is a feast to the eyes to see and experience really. The latest iteration of the uEFI interface finally has become mature and I've actually started to really like it. Apply a nice liquid cooling kit on the processor and you will get to the 4200~4500 MHz range with a 5960X fairly enough. 

Storage

Combined with ten SATA 6Gbps ports we can hardly complain about anything. SATA Express is supported, but I foresee that'll be a dead ship in the water. More interesting I find to be the all new M.2 interface, pop in a M.2 compatible PCI-E SSD and you'll see your SSD quickly perform in the 700/800 Mb/sec range. Overall your SATA and M.2 connectivity is plentiful and top notch when it comes to performance. Great to see is that the slot has obtained a x4 PCIe interface connection allowing it 32 Gbps of bandwidth to work in. To compare a little, your preferred SSD SATA3 port has 6 Gbps available ;) So that small form factor SSD solution now is very future proof. 

Tweaking

If you have two left hands in terms of overclocking then fire up the UEFI BIOS and you can select pre configured overclock modes up-to 4.5 GHz, power up and after a few seconds your motherboard will all of the sudden be mildly overclocked. Unfortunately that feature did not work for us as we have a very voltage hungry processor, so we had to overclock manually. Overall though, the tweaking performance of this motherboard was on par with what we expected. Realistically at 1.30~1.35 Volts you should be able to get the Core i7 5960X at roughly 4400 MHz on all cores. We need to apply a hefty 1.40 Volts for that. And even though that seems high, it remains to be 4400 MHz on 8 physical CPU cores, the performance is huge. Others have been able to reach 4.5 GHz on all 8-cores with just a 1.25v Vcore. Some CPUs clock great on low voltages, other behave like a pig, in our case where we needed 1.40 Volts to reach 4.4 GHz and yes, we have gotten the pig processor. Regardless, overclocking wise, you will have plenty of headroom to fool around with as the OC Formula certainly isn't the limiting factor. It really is a fun processor to tweak with and the motherboard certainly isn't preventing a bad overclock, on the contrary this board was designed to offer all the features needed and quickly get you up-to snuff tweaking wise. A side-note I must make, our Corsair XMP 2667/2800 MHz ready memory would not work with XMP. The system would not boot properly. This memory however works on all other motherboards we tested, and yes we did apply the very latest firmware into the motherboard as well. Hence we left it at JEDEC 2133 MHz

Final Words

Handy related downloads: 

• • Prime95
  • SiSoft Sandra
  • AIDA
  • CPU-Z
  • HWMonitor
    
    
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