<p><span style="font-size: small; "><span style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 19px; ">The end of summer marks the start of the X79 refresh line. We are, at best estimates, coming up to half-way in the Sandy Bridge-E life as the top of the line processor range before Ivy Bridge-E comes to market.&nbsp; Both chips will be expected to run on X79 and the next chipset. But in the meantime, manufacturers are coming up with ways to reinvigorate their X79 line up.&nbsp; So insert ASRock, and the ASRock X79 Extreme11. This motherboard comes with two PLX PEX 8747 chips, making up to 72 PCIe lanes available. This are split into 64 for the PCIe slots (x16/x16/x16/x16 capable), and eight are directed to an LSI SAS 2308 PCIe 3.0 chip, which allows RAID 0, 1 and 10 on eight SATA ports, for a peak throughput of up to 4.0 GBps from eight drives in RAID-0.</span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: small; "><a href="http://www.anandtech.com/show/6228/asrock-x79-extreme11-review-pcie-30-x16x16x16x16-and-lsi-8way-sassata" target="_blank">Read more...</a></span></p>