The Board - Layout

Laid out on my desk, ready to be tortured, the ASRock X99 OC FORMULA/3.1 looks pretty darn spiffy. The golden heatsinks match the yellow plastic better than you'd think, and the weight and heft of this board has the golden color make sense. Looking at either side, you can see the mess of stuff all over the place due to the many goodies and features that are included to meet your overclocking needs.


Of course, when it comes to overclocking and Intel's X99 Express platform, you need some special equipment in the socket by the way of additional pins that allow for greater flexibility in clocking up certain parts of the chip. These extra pins are over and above the "2011" the platform advertises. The ASRock X99 OC FORMULA/3.1 without a doubt has one of these fabled "OC Socket" configurations.


Capable of pushing a total of 128 GB, the 8 DIMM slots situated on either side of the socket are capable of running both ECC and non-ECC ram, although ECC does require that you use a XEON CPU, which does add the option for up to 18 CPU cores in a single socket.


The slot connectivity is all PCIe-based, with five full-length slots that have various configurations dependent on your CPU and how you populate the other parts of the board (such as the PCIe M.2 slots). There is also a Mini-PCIe slot, so if you have a half-height wireless card, you can add it too.


The backplate is mostly comprised of USB ports, as we commonly find these days, but most other ports you'd want are here too, including a USB 3.1 Type-C port. SATA connectivity is huge and includes a single attachment for a SATA Express product, though I'm still waiting to see these devices hit retail. However, I am happy to report that my prototype drive populated with a RAID of 256 GB Sandisk mSATA drives works great.


There are two separate M.2 slots on the ASRock X99 OC FORMULA/3.1; one is an ultra-high-speed PCIe 3.0 x4-capable slot and the other is only capable of PCIe 2.0 x2. Both support SATA 6 Gb/s drives.


The bottom edge of the ASRock X99 OC FORMULA/3.1 has most of the usual things, including USB 2.0 headers, some buttons, and a 4-pin MOLEX plug to add power to the PCIe slots; pins, plugs, buttons, and more. :P