ASRock X79 Fatal1ty Professional Motherboard

Conclusions

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.