A Closer Look
Starting out with the backplate you get a whole bunch of connectivity. 4x USB 3.0 ports, 6 USB 2.0 ports,a keyboard port, various audio connections and a 1Gb NIC is a nice way to start things. You also get an adapter so you can have an additional two USB 3.0 ports in the front or rear of your case which is a very nice touch.
A really cool feature is the Fatal1ty USB port. This port allows you to change the polling rate on the port to increase the response time for your mouse. If you already have a mouse with this feature it is not of much use, but if you do not have that feature it can come in handly.
Moving on, this board gets a whopping 10 SATA ports. Six of which are Sata3 and the other four are Sata2. Also in that area of the board you get the physical power and reset buttons. I absolutely love when board makers include those on a motherboard, as well as the debug screen. I can’t recall the amount of times that I have needed those physical switches because my power button was broken on my case.
So if you were thinking about running 4-way crossfire or SLI you should have no problems at all doing so. While the board does not come with a 4-way SLI connector, you can easily find one online if you are going to take that route. And when it comes to installing four cards there is sufficient spacing to do so with this board. However, if you go that route you will not have access to any of the PCI or PCIe-1x slots (unless you choose to go the water route).
Moving up the socket area of this board is great. There is very little around the socket area. This is a great thing for those who want to go the extreme cooling route with this board. Insulating around the socket should be a breeze which is a nice change from a certain other motherboard I am currently using.
Since there is no northbridge chip on X79 boards Asrock has decided to not include a heatsink there like certain other motherboard makers even though there is no northbridge. I’ve gotta say that companies who put a heatsink there even though there is no northbridge make me quite frustrated.
For those of you who were expecting tons of DIMM slots you will be disapointed. There are only four slots on the X79 Professional. With ram prices these days though you shouldn’t have any issues getting 8Gb sticks cheap enough if your heart desires. I personally use 8Gb of ram so the lack of slots does not bother me one bit, but for some it could be a bother.
This board really gives me the vibe of being targeted toward gamers and overclockers. As such you get a ton of power phases. A 16+2 section to be exact. This means you will get a load of power delivered to your CPU. I must say though that I am kind of disapointed that there is not another 8-pin power connector for people who do extreme overclocking. This will not affect too many people unless you are one of the few using liquid nitrogen on your processor.
You do not have to worry about all of that power causing issues with this board. All of the caps on the board are 100% Japanese. There will be no exploding caps on this board
BIOS
Visually speaking, the bios is a little rough around the edges. But if you can get over that it is a solid bios.
Overclockers out there should be quite happy with this bios. It is loaded with features and settings, but does not overwhelm you with tons of things you would never need to tweak. Some board companies try to give you settings to tweak every possible timing or voltage on the board, but in reality you shouldn’t have to. Even extreme overclockers won’t need most of those settings.
If you so choose to use the pre-set overclocking profiles be aware that this uses voltage offsets. So if you go to bump up your voltage that 1.45v might suddenly turn into 1.8v. A good idea might be to turn off those offset voltages and manually set your own vcore.
Another thing to keep in mind is the Load-Line calibration. Keep in mind that it works on this board, VERY well. In fact, once you get to the higher levels of LLC it will in fact overvolt in relation to the voltage you selected. While more voltage isn’t necessarily a bad thing, some people are scared of voltage so keep your LLC level in mind when overclocking.
If I had to take away one thing from this bios and change, I would say I would really like the addition of the ability to input voltages and timings using the keyboard. It is sort of annoying to have to go through a big list of numbers to choose a voltage or setting that you want. This is not a huge deal, but something that could be implemented in future bios revisions or future products.
Now, on to performance!
