Introduction

Over the past several weeks we've taken a look at many Intel Z77 Express products from various manufacturers, all of which take a slightly different approach in their implementation. Today we have yet another Z77 Express-based product, but this time from an OEM I've not had the chance to cover before, none other than ASRock. ASRock has been in the motherboard business for just a bit over ten years now, and since they spun themselves off from ASUS as a seperate entity, they've slowly gained market share to the point that they are considered one of the top three motherboard OEMs globally, selling 8 million boards during 2011. With that widespread adoption, many of our readers have asked us to cover ASRock products, and at the beginning of June during Computex I managed to secure a contact and shortly after a couple of samples arrived at my door, the first of which is the ASRock Z77 Extreme9. So what makes ASRock so popular? I'm about to find out.

Specifications