Board Layout

There is so much I want to say about this motherboard from ASRock... but just feast your eyes on what you behold before you instead. There is much to see here, both front and rear. Removing the yellow from the OC Formula series and switching to gray was a fantastic choice.


The huge socket area is closely flanked by the memory slots, but there is just enough room here for insulation for sub-zero overclocking. There is a hole inside the socket you can use to thread a thermal probe to, so you can get an idea of the temperature on the underside of the CPU's PCB, too.


There are only four DIMM slots on the ASRock X299 OC Formula. This allows the memory to scale up much higher in speed than if the board had all eight possible slots, and since most users are likely to be happy with 32 GB by the way of four 8 GB sticks, four slots are more than enough for such a purpose-designed board as this.


There are but two M.2 slots on the ASRock X299 OC Formula; one above and another below the board's chipset cooler.


You get five PCIe 3.0 x16 slots, a PCIe 3.0 x4 slot, and a PCIe 2.0 x1 slot. Electrical connectivity for these slots depends on which CPU you use. KabyLake-X CPUs do get SLI support. SATA connectivity features six ports through the Intel X299 chipset, while an additional two have been added using an ASMedia ASM1061 controller. It is pretty obvious which ports are which.


The board's bottom edge carries a whole host of pin headers and such, including dual front-panel audio headers, one of which is right-angled. The board's POST display is here as well.


The X299 OC Formula's rear I/O ports include USB ports in all flavors, dual LAN ports, audio plugs, and both a Clear CMOS button and USB Flashback button for BIOS restoration. You know, all that good stuff. Those LAN ports are pushed via a pair of Intel LAN controllers; the I219-V and I211-AT, naturally.