Out of all the X79 motherboard pictures we've seen in recent weeks -- and we've seen a whole bunch of them -- not a single one has been representative of a micro-ATX mainboard. ASRock just changed that by releasing photos and information of its upcoming X79 Extreme4-M, a pint-sized board built around Intel's socket LGA2011 for Sandy Bridge-E.

If you're familiar with the ASRock brand, you probably recognize it as a builder of budget motherboards. ASRock has been known to appeal to enthusiasts with next generation and/or unique design decisions, like the 939Dual-SATA2 that combined both an AGP port and PCI-Express ports on the same board so users could have a GPU upgrade path to PCI-E without overhauling their foundation. ASRock's latest concoction is the Fatal1ty Z68 Professional Gen3 motherboard, the first ever to implement PCI-E 3.0 ports.

It's probably not fair to call ASRock an underdog anymore, if it ever was. Asus gave birth to ASRock back in 2002 with the intent of going toe-to-toe with ECS and other vendors in the entry-level market. Here we are nearly a decade later and ASRock is now the third largest motherboard maker in the world, DigiTimes says.

ASRock shipped 8 million of its own branded motherboards in 2010, leapfrogging both ECS and MSI to take third place, albeit a somewhat distant one.

Ahead of ASRock is Gigabyte, which shipped around 18 million of its own branded boards in 2010. And up in first place is who else but Asus, which missed its goal of shipping 25 million boards last year but retained the top spot by cranking out 21.6 million mobos.

Getting back to ASRock, the company has been able to attract a following by offering big feature-sets for comparatively low prices. The company also isn't afraid to take design risks, as it first did with its 939Dual-SATA board back in the day. This inexpensive board was the first to combine both an AGP and PCI-E port on the same board without introducing a significant performance penalty.

The bean counters at Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, and every other first-tier motherboard maker are working overtime crunching numbers and trying to get a pulse on the mobo market.

June hasn't been kind to any of the motherboard makers except MSI, which saw revenues jump 13.05 percent over the previous month. ECS took the biggest hit, recording a drop of 17.73 percent, followed by Asus at 5.53 percent. Gigabyte, Pegatron, and ASRock also skidded backwards to the tune of 5.48 percent, 3.1 percent, and 0.94 percent, respectively.

But while June wasn't particularly kind to most of the major motherboard players, they've all seen positive gains for the year, except for ASRock, which is down 11.94 percent. Asus is the biggest winner, having increased its revenues to 68.62 percent on year, while Pegatron and MSI recorded gains of 20.4 percent and 19.03 percent, respectively. Everyone else saw double digit gains as well.

More here.