Introduction

Recently we checked out the ASRock X79 Extreme4 which did a good job of impressing us with its strong performance and excellent price point. Jump forward just a little and we find ourselves looking at another motherboard following a similar naming scheme in the form of the ASRock X79 Extreme4-M.

If you've followed what goes on with the ASRock model numbers, you would know that the -M refers to the board using the mATX Format. The mATX boards from ASRock, though, don't only bring with it a smaller board, they also bring with it a cheaper price and at the time of writing the ASRock Extreme4-M is the cheapest X79 motherboard available at Newegg, coming in at $218.99 US.

It will be interesting to see how the cheapest X79 board performs today. Before we see how the X79 Extreme4-M performs, though, we need to check out the package and bundle to see what ASRock are offering us in that department; once we've done that we'll take a closer look at the board before we move into the BIOS.

Once we've done that we'll head into the testbed to see what we'll be testing today. From there we'll then get into the overclocking side of things to see how our mATX board handled our 3960X before we of course get into the performance of the ASRock X79 Extreme4.

The Package

Checking out the box, you can see it's very similar to the X79 Extreme4 we looked at. The main difference is it's a bit smaller, though, since we're of course dealing with a small board. The back of the box continues to give us an absolute wealth of information.

Moving inside the package is similar to its big brother, the X79 Extreme4. Saying that, we do have two less SATA cables along with the 3-Way SLI bridge not being included. Apart from that, we've got everything else you'll be used to seeing, including some paperwork, driver CD, two SATA cables, SLI bridge and I/O backplate.