ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion 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.

After spending a lot of time with the ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion, although the results were a bit low on the CPU side, the low power consumption and obvious reasoning as to why it underperformed, has left me quite happy with the complete package. ASRock has some software that really appeals to me, mainly XFastRam, something that no other board maker offers. The really expansive PCIe functionality and perfect slot organization for triple-card use has convinced me that this board is going into my full-time gaming rig along with three HD 6950s. It's unfortunate to have run into the compatibility and Turbo issues I noticed, but these should be fairly easy to fix with a BIOS update, one that can even be downloaded while sitting inside the BIOS after POST! I will be working with ASRock to make sure these few outstanding issues are resolved. As for a product that has only been on the market for a couple of months, this is par for the course for early adoption of high-end hardware. Considering I had been using an ASUS P9X79 Deluxe for many months now, and that board sells in retail for the same cost as the ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion, ASRock really has a winner here if they crush the current BIOS problems.

The ASRock X79 Fatal1ty Champion is the most complete LGA2011 motherboard money can buy. It has five PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots (although “only” four can be used at the same time) supporting both SLI and CrossFireX, 12 USB 3.0 ports, six SATA-600 ports, a professional-grade audio controller, two FireWire ports, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, a PLX PEX8605 chip to give bandwidth to the device that is requiring performance, 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. The main problem with this motherboard is, of course, its price. Costing USD 400, it is reserved for a select few who will need all the features it brings and who are fortunate enough to have the money to buy it. For the typical enthusiasts, there are products that offer better cost/benefit ratio.