The Board - Layout

ASRock has taken red to another level, with huge blocks of if all over the place. Flipping the board over revealed that the heatsinks are secured with screws.


It's immediately obvious that the board has dual BIOS chips, both socketed and replaceable. Speaking of sockets, considering some of the other boards I have played with recently, the board's socket area in the rear is pretty open.


The ASRock Z97X KILLER comes with six slots: a triplet of PCIe 3.0 x16 slots split in the usual Haswell-based fashion (x16, x8/x8, or x8/x4/x4) and a triplet of PCIe 2.0 x1 slots driven by the Intel Z97 PCH. The four DIMM slots can hold up to 32 GB in total.


The board's bottom edge holds all the usual stuff and a MOLEX-based power plug to supply additional power to areas that need it, like the PCIe slots. The right side is filled with a TPM header and front-panel stuff.


In the back are the legacy video connectors and all the normal bits, with HDMI the only digital video connector. The SATA ports are a rather strange mix of both SATA 6 Gb/s and SATA Express. Confirmed in my own testing, although I did not exactly expect my ASUS-branded drive to work, and disclosed on the ASRock webpage, which devices are compatible with the board is not yet fully known.


There are six fan headers on the ASRock Z97X KILLER, four of which are 3-pin. The other two are 4-pin headers. The ASRock Fatal1ty seems to be a mixture of old and new. I can see that clearly now.