With the highest possible compute performance that consumers can purchase, Intel's Haswell-E processors and the X99 chipset make a viable combination for users with demanding workloads. If the price, features, and performance are right, there's nothing stopping a semi-professional buying a consumer-grade motherboard to house their LGA2011-3 CPU and DDR4 memory.

Bearing that in mind, ASRock has given its X99 series of motherboards the ?Extreme11? treatment. What exactly does that mean? It translates into a high-end, feature-heavy motherboard whose secret sauce is deployed in the form of an LSI SAS 3008 storage controller to provide eight SAS 12Gbps connections.