ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion (X79) Motherboard Review

Taking everything that this board has to offer into consideration, and noting its varied performance against its power consumption, on the whole I’d have to say that I’m pretty impressed with what the X79 Fatal1ty Champion has to offer. Once factor that does stand out a little more is its ease of overclocking and the easy to use BIOS. With barely any trouble at all we had our chip running at 4.8GHz straight out of the box using the pre-set overclocks that the BIOS has to offer. For many users this is an added bonus and adds to the appeal that the board has to offer and also making its price more worth while, even though we know that X79 is inherently more expensive than Z77 for example.

The boards styling is not too brash or over the top and the subtle Fatal1ty branding blends in with the rest of the boards rad and black colour scheme. Looking at the features ASRock have added a whole bucket load to this board and the Fatal1ty gaming port which configures a USB mouse to run as Wendell himself would have again just adds to the deal to make the price more justified.

To justify the price even more, the inclusion of Creative Sound Core 3D audio, support for up to four way GPU configurations, a heap of SATA III, good overclocking performance and the fact that is is cheaper than ASRocks own X79 Extreme 11 series board surely means this is worthy of consideration even though its benchmark performance is not necessarily right up there with all the other board right through the tests.

When it comes to choosing a new board, as highlighted right back at the start, deciding whether to go X79 or Z77 is really down to your primary use of the system, if you’re looking to just game, then I’d with out a doubt say go for Z77 and spend the bit of cash that you would save on an SSD or a better GPU, but if pure grunt and powerhouse work is what you’re after for Photoshop or rendering for example then X79 is the answer.

Bottom line, The X79 Fatal1ty Champion may not be the quickest board that we have looked at out of the box, but with a little overclock to unleash the extra performance that Intel’s chips have to offer, you can get yourself a reasonably priced board that can give the others on the market a run for their money, making this one to consider in the short-list. Even though it is more expensive to buy along with a socket 2011 chip over Z77, when marked against other X79 offerings, the value is there, giving this board our bang for buck in its class.