The boards from the Extreme gaming line are designed for overclocking within reasonable limits (for the unreasonable there is a Taichi line). Most often they are built on the basis of flagship chipsets (Intel Z490/590 or AMD X470/570), work with Ryzen and Intel Core processors of the latest generations, have all the necessary connection slots, with which you will not have to regret the lack of something important. Thanks to high-quality circuitry and an advanced power subsystem, they are designed for extreme overclocking of top-end components.


As befits gaming motherboards with such a sonorous name, most boards are equipped with serious power subsystems for 10 – 14 phases, VRM cooling, Japanese capacitors and advanced circuitry. In the 2020 – 21 models, ASRock added support for the fourth-generation PCI-E bus and introduced Nahimic Sound sound improvement and virtualization technology. This is a specialized army development that has recently come to the world of gaming PCs, and now all major manufacturers are actively implementing it. Also, many cards in the series support the Base Frequency Boost mode, with which you can overclock an Intel processor with a locked multiplier bypassing the lock.

And now let's look at the entire line using the example of the bestseller ASRock Z490 Extreme4. This is a flagship motherboard with an LGA1200 processor socket, which allows the installation of up to 128 GB of high-speed DDR4 RAM and a pair of fast M-format solid-state drives.2. In the list of other things useful for a gamer, you need to add a 2.5-gigabit Dragon RTL8125BG network controller, a high-quality audio track with a separate optical output, reinforced PCI-E 16x connectors and the ability to install a pair of video cards in Crossfire mode. Such an option will become a solid foundation for a near-prototype gaming computer with an overclocked Ryzen 7/Core i7 processor and an NVIDIA RTX 3060 or 3070 graphics card.