While other motherboard manufacturers seem to be getting less creative with their designs, Asrock has shown it doesn't mind taking chances with its products and continues to push boundaries. The company currently offers fourteen X99 motherboards and most are extreme in both price and features. For example, the X99 Extreme11 costs $620 and it's not even their most expensive model. That honor goes to the X99 WS-E/10G, an awesome server-grade board that features an Intel X540 controller for dual 10G Base-T support.

If you read our recent article "The Ridiculously Powerful MicroATX PC" you will also know that Asrock has done something few others have by creating a MicroATX board based on the X99 chipset. The Fatal1ty X99M Killer is a great little mATX board and so is the X99M Extreme4

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The MicroATX versions still boast many of the features found on the full-size Extended ATX motherboards such as quad-channel DIMMs, dual Gigabit LAN, 10 SATA storage connectors and so on. What we haven't seen is a Mini-ITX version using the X99 platform and not that long ago I would have deemed it impossible. I've since discovered the Asrock X99E-ITX/ac.

Somehow someone at Asrock got the greenlight to develop an X99 motherboard using the Mini-ITX form factor, and somehow they made it work.

The Asrock X99E-ITX/ac is the world's first and only Mini-ITX X99 motherboard along with being the first ever Mini-ITX motherboard to feature an Intel Extreme-series chipset