asrock z97 extreme6 or extreme6ac vs fatal1ty professional

vigneshsai20

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Oct 28, 2013
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As the title says which is better ? especially for gaming... asrock z97 extreme6 or extreme6ac vs fatal1ty professional
 
ya... i read that article and asrock z97 extreme6 is tom's hardware smart buy award but aside from that asrock is not getting much support/talk from peoples as Asus and MSI and Gigabyte is getting... it makes me to doubt about their quality and customer service etc... and also here in India even major online retailers have only 1 or 2 asrock boards and some have none of the asrock boards... don't know why... in general why people is not preferring Asrock much when compared to other Motherboards?
 
I had the same dilemma and picked up the Extreme6.... would have gotten the /ac version but it's another $20+ and I keep my desktop hardwired to prevent latency from creeping in so didn't think it was worth it. I use bluetooth but that board has plenty of ports so not a big deal to plug a bluetooth USB dongle in. A number of people had complaints with the sound on the Fitali1y board. On the other hand what I don't like about the Extreme6 is that it cuts the bandwidth of the second PCI slot to x4 if you plug something into the M.2 port (which is 3rd gen capable at 32Gb/s vs the 10GB/s on the Fatal1ty board). I do run SLI and I'm not sure I made the correct choice because of this.
What did you end up with or are you still trying to decide?
 
Hey there vigneshsai20,

To answer your primary question, any board you choose will suit you well provided we are yet taking about the 2 ASrock boards stated in your title as most of a board that shows a little more oomph than the other in some scenarios is negligible. The Fatal1ty board is just a board with a few more bells and whistles similar to the ROG series of boards by Asus although now they follow a much higher QC management and are dubbed to be the highest rated boards due to their higher quality of components that go into making one.

FYI, ASRock was a sister concern of Asus back in the day and they slowly broke off to form their own music. They just think adding some personality on the box will help it sell more units 😉

As per the pointer about low stocking around your area, I'm from Bangladesh and I can relate to the lack of choices in hardware when in comes to the IT industry. People or more so the importers tend to favor products which have more hype and ofc more customer feedbacks and sometimes who seems to play the loudest music at the festival. Don't worry about any of that just make sure you're offered good warranty period that the seller honors his services and that you have the option to swap it out should you choose to.

Reliability can be an issue and ASRock isn't new to it. Once they had capacitors blow up at stock clocks for their AMD boards - that doesn't mean the company is going bankrupt or shutting down but means some of its QC might've fallen through the roof. What might've happened was that the importer stocked on lower tiered boards to save costs. This is evident all over the world where Tier 1 products find their way into 1st world countries and Tier 3 and lower products come down to 3rd world countries. You can go ahead and choose a MSI, Gigabyte or Asus board for the Z97 platform and you won't be disappointed.

Lastly,
People are dumb.
is proved by the inclusion of a link suggesting to read Newegg reviews.

The reasoning behind posting links of reviews by revered tech sites is because the hardware they have are cherry picked samples and ofc the hardware they use for tests are somewhat standardized instead of having haphazard configurations. I ended up buying an A85x-itx board that had the worst of reviews on Newegg (and was replaced by the A88x) yet I'm perfectly fine with what I'm using it for. In short Amazon, Newegg, Craigslist, Ebay reviews - big no no.

OP,
You could also check out other forums if the boards in question have any issues on the compatibility end.
 
I disagree. I find the tech reviews handy. But they are on new mobos in lab conditions. I also take into account user reviews. If they are both good then I feel confident in recommending the item.

I think the more sources of info you have the better your decision can be.

Anyway - that's just me.
 

As SLi will only run at 8x + 8x or 16x + 16x, you'll be fine so as you don't plug anything into that slot and try to use SLi at the same time.

 

That review doesn't mention the Fatality board so it is not useful for a comparison.

I don't want to bury the lead so the most important feature is the Fatality is actually cheaper than the Extreme 6 by about $14. That's only true for this exact moment on Amazon so in the future it might not be so.

Other than price, the major differences (that matter) seem to be:

  • ■ Fatality has a SoundBlaster, Extreme 6 has RealTek for sound.
    ■ Fatality has Qualcomm E2200, Extreme 6's has RealTek RTL8111GR for second LAN.
    ■ Fatality has one more PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot.
    ■ Fatality has no DVI ports, Extreme 6 has one DVI port.
    ■ Fatality has built in keyboard macros and mouse polling feature, Extreme 6 doesn't.
The Fatality wins on every point and it's cheaper so it's a no-brainer: buy the Fatality. (I don't care about a DVI port on my motherboard so that doesn't matter to me.)

You can compare the features yourself using ASRock's own site:

Extream6:
http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Z97%20Extreme6/?cat=Specifications

Fatality:
http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Fatal1ty%20Z97%20Professional/?cat=Specifications

Note: I refuse to use numbers in place of letters because I am not a 12 year old.
 


LOL, I hear you on that last statement. I ended up with the Extreme6 and I'm happy with it. It was less expensive than the Fitality at the time. I haven't heard good things about the "killer" LAN (high CPU utilization) and more than one person complained about the sound on Newegg so I didn't consider either of those options necessarily a plus. The biggest advantage of the Fitality to me was that extra PCIe slot but I'll never run 3x SLI so not a biggie either. The one "advantage" the X6 has is that it has a Ultra M.2 slot (which kills the SLI option completely), but all-in-all the boards seemed pretty much equal to me. I was able to get the X6 locally versus the Fitality which I would have had to order. If there was a problem it would have been a PITA to deal with... luckily, aside from a loud liquid cooling pump, everything has gone smoothly thus-far. Honestly I don't think you can go wrong with either so go for the less expensive (or local) option.

Peace