X99 OC Formula review

Damascus · February 10, 2018

Asrock X99 OC Formula

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General overview

This board received a great deal of praise on its launch due to the easy and stable overclocking potential. You can't forget the looks, of course. This bright gold and black eatx board has the flashiest color scheme around and is nearly impossible to match with any out of the box gpu with a few options for cpu cooling.

All in all the board is designed with LN2 overclockes in mind but gives a fair bit to prosumers and gamers alike. The standout features are a waterproofed 8 layer pcb, the ability to shut off pcie slots physically and many voltage sensors/regulators.

With 10 sata ports, 5 pcie x16 slots, 2 m.2 2210 and 1 mpcie slot this board is ready for an insane amount of expansion.

full m.2 22110, most boards cap out at 2280.

Strangely the OCF uses an inverted cpu mount. The 8 dimm slots can accept up to 128gb of ddr4 on broadwell-e cpus and will accept xeons + ecc ddr4

Test system:

6950x/6800k

2x8gb tridentz rgb 3000mhz/cas 16

980 ti g1

AX 860

NH-D14

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Ui/Bios

All around the interface is very useable, simple to navigate. All around it's standard fare with a few features that make it stand out, specifically the amount of options and several solidly constructed OC profiles.

Many options from air to ln2, though I can't see many users taking advantage of the ln2 profiles. (Borrowed image from anandtech)

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Performance

Can't collect data at present time. I will update this thread once the system is functional again.

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Customer support

This all around great board is sadly let down by the sub-par customer support. The stock bios isn't compatible with broadwell-e (understandable, this IS a first gen x99 motherboard) so when I first used it, no luck. After several hours of troubleshooting the problem was found, the bios needed updating. During this time I contacted the customer support several times, eventually leading to a message asking me to open a ticket with the store I purchased from. There was no further assistance offered and the seller was a lost cause so I would up buying a replacement chip and living with a downed board until it arrived.

Now, after switching cpus I have the same issue again. The chances are high that I will again receive no support and will need to buy a chip from a third party! It would be extremely simple to send or sell me a replacement with an updated BIOS, several large brands do.

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Conclusion

A really solid motherboard with lots of potential and several interesting features but difficult to recommend, I've had the motherboard be unusable for long periods of time on two occasions due to the same reccuring issue and have received no support from the company. This, along with the lack of spectre and meltdown updates makes me leery of recommending it despite my adoration of the hardware.

Hardware 8/10

Software 8/10

Performance untested due to bios issues

Support 1/10

Herman Mcpootis · February 10, 2018

12 minutes ago, Damascus said:

Asrock X99 OC Formula

_____________________________________

General overview

This board received a great deal of praise on its launch due to the easy and stable overclocking potential. You can't forget the looks, of course. This bright gold and black eatx board has the flashiest color scheme around and is nearly impossible to match with any out of the box cooler or gpu.

Reeven Justice and Okeanos have yellow fans and are pretty good performers.