ASRock Z97 Extreme6 Motherboard Review (w/ Samsung XP941 M.2 SSD)

1. Introduction2. ASRock Z97 Extreme6: Packaging and Bundle3. ASRock Z97 Extreme6: Board Layout and Features4. ASRock Z97 BIOS5. ASRock Z97 Software6. Testing Methodology7. Tests: System-related8. Tests: Processor-related9. Tests: Gaming-related10. Tests: Motherboard-related11. Overclocking: Frequencies12. Overclocking: Performance13. Technical: PCIe Performance w/ Ultra M.214. Technical: Power Consumption15. Closing Thoughts16. View All Pages

ASRock's Ultra M.2 connection uses four PCIe 3.0 lanes from an LGA 1150 CPU's total of sixteen. As such, populating the Ultra M.2 slot forces a graphics card's bandwidth to be dropped to PCIe 3.0 x8 (when a single card is used).

We ran our gaming benchmarks to observe what affect, if any, the reduced bandwidth had on graphics performance.

Going from a PCIe 3.0 x16 link to an x8 connection does have a slight impact on performance, but the reduced frame rate numbers are largely negligible.

The numbers shown in the chart are sacrifices that many people are going to be willing to accept in order to obtain the 32Gbps Ultra M.2 link.

Become a Patron!