The gaming experience with this mobo was great, but not the overclocking experience. ASRock will probably correct this with a future BIOS update, they did put a ton of overclocking tools into this board though. The reviewers did not get a chance to try out the Core Unlocker function. The ASRock 870 Extreme3 is fast, clean, easy to use and the retail price was spotted below $90.-. This mainboard could be one of the best AMD based motherboards in terms of price/performance.

Overclocking:

The overclocking with this mobo was not spectacular. The reviewers ran into quite a few issues once they pushed past 233MHz base clock. In the end they reached 3.84GHz stable overclock (240MHz x16) with an AMD Phenom II X6 1090T.

BIOS:

ASRock has not made the BIOS just for the enthusiast, they've also added nice features for the the novice.

Compared to:

This mainboard was not compared to another board, but instead to its own overclocking results.

Test Setup:

• Memory: 2x2GB Kingston CMT4GX3M2A2000C8.
• SSD: Corsair Force F120 120GB.
• Water Cooler: Corsair H70.
• PSU: Corsair AX1200 1200 watt.
• OS: Windows 7 Ultimate x64.

Benchmarks:

Temperature, Power Consumption, HyperPi, Lightwave 3D, AutoGK, Battlefield Bad Company 2, Call of Duty Modern Warfare, 3D Mark Vantage, Cinebench, Far Cry 2, Lavalys Everest Ultimate, PC mark vantage, Sisoft Sandra. In the gaming benches an AMD Radeon HD5870 1GB was used.