Introduction

Just a short while ago, I spent some time with my first ASRock product, the Z77 Extreme9. When covering that product, I mentioned that more ASRock coverage was coming. Even since then, a few more samples have arrived at my door! With no time to waste, here's our second ASRock product, none other than the Fatal1ty X79 Champion!

ASRock has been around for a wee bit over 10 years now, having just recently celebrated their tenth anniversary of being their own company. During those ten years, they've definitely made a name for themselves with countless requests falling into my PM box on the forums asking for reviews. After some work on W1zzard's part, we got ourselves a contact and the samples arrived shortly afterwards. I was a bit surprised with my first review sample, an ES sample product that was a bit short of all the functionality full retail products have. The Fatal1ty X79 Champion, today's product, is very much a different animal, and is yet another high-end enthusiast offering, that has everything a high-end multi-GPU gamer needs, as well as a few things for the extreme clocker!

Specifications

Intel X79 Express Chipset

Launched November 14th, 2011, the Intel X79 Express chipset is very similar to the Intel P67 Express and Intel Z68 Express chipsets launched earlier in 2011. The Intel X79 Express platform supports 40 PCIe 3.0 lanes via the CPU for graphics, while the Intel Z68/P67 Express chipsets supports only 16 lanes. Of course, the Intel X79 Express PCH itself supports eight lanes of PCIe 2.0 connectivity for external devices, as well as housing all of the I/O functionality via dual SATA 6 Gb/s ports and quad SATA 3 Gb/s ports which are managed via Intel Rapid Storage Technology 3.0 for RAID support. USB 2.0/3.0 and HD Audio are also supported as is eSATA and Gigabit Ethernet connectivity.


The SKT2011 CPUs that the platform supports are also very similar to the previously released SKT1155 CPUs, but nearly everything offered in the SKT1155 platform has been doubled up, including cache and core count. Going by the marketing material given out by Intel, the SB-E CPUs (as they are referred to in enthusiast circles) feature eight total processing cores, but two have been disabled to keep power in check, so rather than a total of eight cores active, we find just six, but as these cores feature Hyper-Threading, they appear as 12 separate cores to the OS.

The PCIe on the CPU can be split many ways, including dual x16 links and a single x8 link at the same time, a single x16 link with triple x8 links, or a single x16 link with dual x8 and dual x4 links. Together these options offer the most flexibility for multi-card GPU configurations, with support for up to five total devices connected directly to the CPU. While only four discrete GPUs maximum are supported in current multi-GPU rendering options, the 5th link can be used for an external RAID controller or other PCIe devices that are commonly found in high-end builds.

The ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion is a quad-GPU supporting X79 Express for both AMD's CrossFire and NVIDIA's SLI. In fact, there are no less than five PCIe 3.0-compliant slots, ensuring that no matter your needs, the ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion is ready to take your system to Champion levels.

Packaging

Like the majority of ASRock Fatal1ty packaging, the Fatal1ty X79 Champion comes in a red and black box with a picture of Fatal1ty himself staring back at you. Nothing much more than the board's name and a few technology logos are found on the front, while the back gets to the point with fairly in-depth listings of the features the ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion is equipped with.


I also found a flap on the front of the box with a short story telling us a bit about the face on the front of the box and a few Fatal1ty-specific highlights the board supports. There's also a clear window into the box’s innards found under the flap, letting you see what you are getting while still at the store.


Inside the box I found two other boxes, as shown above. The board itself is secured in the box using some high-density foam that's wrapped around the outer edge of the board's packaging tray.


The goodies the ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion comes with are contained in their own box, which is comprised of two sections separated by a cardboard divider. On one side I found all the paper-based goods as well as the driver CD and rear I/O back-plate, while the other side was stuffed full of assorted cabling and other goodies that help you get the most you can out of your board.