Taiwanese motherboard specialist ASRock has an interesting differentiating feature installed on its latest top of the range Intel 9 Series motherboard. The firm has equipped the Z97 Extreme6 with a doubled transfer bandwidth M.2 storage interface which is said to "blow the others away".
ASRock says that it can see other firms proliferate the PCIe Gen2 x2 M.2 interface on the desktop but that it wants to take the lead from competitors by offering the Ultra M.2 PCIe Gen3 x4 socket on its Z97 Extreme6 motherboard. The press release announcing the feature charted the interface's theoretical speed at 32Gb/s which is 6X faster than PCIe x1 M.2, and 3X faster than PCIe x2 M.2. Also you can see charts for CrystalDiskMark and IO Meter benchmarks below according to ASRock's internal tests.
Kindly ASRock explains the 'secret' of its interface speed. It's a lot to do with interfacing directly with the CPU; "On a regular motherboard design, the signal route starts from the M.2 device, goes through the onboard chipset, and finally reaches CPU. In contrast, by connecting the M.2 interface to CPU directly, ASRock Ultra M.2 has lower latency and pushes the I/O speed to a new level." ASRock's horizontal M.2 installation design also is said to prevent interference with PCIe graphics cards and support the full range of M.2 device lengths (42, 60, 80 or 110mm).
While the Ultra M.2 interface is an exclusive to the top of the range ASRock 9 Series motherboard it shares the stage with a lot of ASRock signature features including; ASRock Super Alloy technology, 12 Phase Power Design, Purity Sound 2, Dual LAN, SATA Express interface, ASRock Cloud and more. Readers can discover more about the Z97 Extreme6 and the rest of ASRock's Intel 9 series boards here.
