ASRock Z97 Extreme6 LGA1150 ATX 4xDDR3 3xPCI-E-16 2xPCI-E-1 1xPCI-E-Mini 6xSATA3 Motherboard

Comment:
I was most impressed that ASRock offers an HDD password option in their bios, which is great for the added security you can get by using it with the built in encryption capabilities of such SSD drives as the Samsung EVO. (Just don't forget your password, or you'll never be able to access your again.) Anyway, as far as I know they are the only desktop motherboard vendor to offer it, though you will have to email their customer support to get the file (but they'll get back to you within 1 business day.)Otherwise, it's a well built board and I have not had any problems with it yet. The ability to choose which bios chip (the board has 2) is a nice bonus in case you mess up the upgrade of one. The diagnostic display also let you know everything is working.Oh, and the internal USB port is great for that wireless usb adapter if you want to keep it within the case.

Comment:
I was mostly interested in this board to support PCIe x4 M.2 storage, but it turns out this is an excellent board overall.It boots very, very quickly - less than 3 seconds from power off to OS. It runs cool - the VRM heatsinks in my older AMD AM3+ board run very hot but components on this board run barely warm to the touch, measured at less than 30 C with an infrared thermometer even at 100% CPU load.There are lots of ports and slots for just about everything you can throw at it. There are two USB 3.0 headers in addition to the old USB 2.0 headers. There's 1 PCIe x16 or two x8/x8, two x1 slots and an x2 slot (x16 physical). There's even a miniPCIe slot for a wireless module, though it's shared with one of the x1 slots. There's the chipset-based PCIe x2 M.2 and SATA Express but there's also the most unique feature of this board - a PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slot running off PCIe lanes from the CPU, not the chipset. There's only one other Z97 board that offers this, the flagship ASRock Z97 Extreme9. Several X99 boards have just been introduced that have this high-bandwidth slot, but this board was the first in the world to have it.All this connectivity through the limited PCIe lanes Z97/LGA 1150 offers means that there are switches and hubs on the board. Sometimes using one port/socket will disable another. All the rear USB ports on the board are USB 3.0, some through the chipset but using an ASMedia hub, and two through an ASMedia USB 3.0 controller. Thankfully the two USB 3.0 headers are directly from the chipset. It might concern anyone using SLI/Crossfire that if the PCIe x4 M.2 slot is used, the two PCIe x16 slots run at x8 and x4. It doesn't bother me though.There are some deluxe on-board features like the debug LED and onboard power/reset buttons, which are coming in very handy as I test out this board in an open case.There are two BIOS chips on this board. What's unusual about them is that there's an onboard switch which permits using one or the other. An LED indicates which one's in use. One chip is flashable, the other cannot be flashed directly. It can only be overwritten by the current BIOS chip, and (obviously) only when the current BIOS chip is running - if you have a bad flash you cannot overwrite the backup BIOS.The UEFI interface is full-featured...perhaps a little too full-featured. It allows you to control absolutely everything so it's quite complicated. Most of these settings would only be altered during overclocking. It's good that they're all there, but figuring them all out is a daunting task.This board is working out great for me so far!