The Board - A Closer Look

ASRock has given special treatment to the Fatal1ty X99 Professional Gaming i7 motherboard in many ways, but first and foremost we have to look at how you power it on. There are onboard buttons provided for those who don't use a full case or are testing the board prior to installation. There are also dual BIOS chips for two profiles to boot with, enabled by flipping the near-by switch.


Should things not work just right when playing with settings, there is an onboard POST display to help you diagnose any boot issues you might encounter. This is a critical part in my books since it allows you to directly diagnose where any issues with precision might be. Speaking of precision, there is a pretty capable Nuvoton Super I/O chip here, responsible for monitoring and fan-control duties.


As is the norm for boards of this level from ASRock's Fatal1ty line-up, we find a Creative SoundBlaster audio implementation. This includes a decent level of electrical isolation for that audio circuit, something that has quite nearly become a standard for all motherboards. Audio is most definitely important when gaming, so it's nice to see the obvious engineering here.


There are two main sources of heat generation on pretty much any motherboard these days; the CPU power circuits and the board's chipset. Both have substantial cooling designs.


The DIMM power circuits also generate a small bit of heat, but with dual-phase power designs for both DIMM banks, heat is minimized and the power delivered is nice and clean, so you can push those high-end memory kits hard.


Finally, added USB connectivity is provided by an ASMedia chip, carefully hidden under the board's I/O cover. The ASMedia ASM1074 hub is nice and close to the plugs themselves to maximize bandwidth.