ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional Pro Reviews

ASRock need to decide whether Fatal1ty is here for the long run. The branding has carried over several generations and chipsets now, but as a brand of motherboard it lags behind the user friendly atmosphere of its competitors. It needs to do something different and something focused beyond the normal plethora of motherboard products – there is no point just sticking a lot of everything onto a PCB then applying a red and black color scheme. It is time to question more than one power user about what a gaming product needs, and develop through successful iterations of focused hardware. ASUS had bundled versions of ROG boards with Battlefield 3 – perhaps the next game Fatal1ty is in love with becomes part of the box as well. There are plenty of possibilities in the world of motherboards, and it all has to be coupled with that optimized user experience.

During the detailed discussion of the features and functionality of the new ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional mainboard we often compared it to competitor products: memory and graphics card slots – like on Asus mainboards, 2 oz copper layer PCB – like in Gigabyte mainboards, USB 3.0 transformer-bracket – like on ECS mainboards. It is a perfectly normal situation, because all competitors carefully watch one another and try to adopt the best features and solutions in their own products. Therefore, it is certainly understandable that ASRock did their best to ensure that their flagship model will have the best of the best in it. As a result, they came up with a truly unique product, which also boasts a number of exclusive unique features such as System Browser and Fatal1ty Mouse Port. The mainboard still has a few design concerns, its power consumption could have been lower than we saw in our tests, and the CPU didn’t reach its maximum frequency during overclocking. However, let’s not forget that the mainboard was officially launched in the end of February, so there is high possibility that the issues will be fixed in the upcoming BIOS updates.

As mentioned in our other articles about motherboards from ASRock based on the Intel X79 chipset, it is clear to us that ASRock is working hard to improve the quality of its products. We were glad to see the voltage regulator circuit of the X79 Fatal1ty Professional using a high-end design with SMD capacitors, and Japanese solid capacitors throughout the motherboard. The X79 Fatal1ty Professional has four PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots supporting SLI and CrossFireX, six SATA-600 ports, two eSATA-600 ports, eight USB 3.0 ports, two FireWire ports, and a special USB port called “Fatal1ty mouse port,” which has a polling rate that can be manually configured between 125 Hz and 1 kHz. Another advantage of this motherboard is that it supports four dual-slot video cards to be installed. The most high-end motherboard from ASRock, the X79 Extreme9, doesn’t support this configuration, even though it has five PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots. You will need a case with at least eight expansion slots if you plan on installing a fourth dual-slot video card. We think its price is more than right for the features it brings. The only negative point we saw on this motherboard was the lack of a sticker or different color on the “Fatal1ty mouse port,” which would help users to correctly identify it.