ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion (X79) Motherboard Review

Setting all the accessories aside, its time to have a closer look at the X79 Fatal1ty Champion. With popular trends, the board has a red and black theme with highlights on the SATA, DIMM slots, and PCIe slots.

As with any other X79 board we find two sets of DIMM slots, with four either side of the socket. Surrounding the socket we also find a set of heat sinks to cool the power regulators around the socket.

On the top edge of the board nestled in between capacitors and chokes we find a single 8-pin power connector to deliver power to the CPU. 

Further down the board, there is a large Fatal1ty branded passive heat sink to keep the X79 chip set cool.

In addition to the four DIMM slots we saw previously, in typical X79 fashion we find a further four DIMM slots towards to other side of the board. Beside these and to either side of the 24-pin ATX power connector we find two native USB 3.0 headers and to the right a set of voltage check points.

Down on the PCIe corner of the board we find support for up to four way SLI or CrossFireX through the use of the five x16 lanes. nestled between the top two and bottom two lanes are two additional x1 lanes. On board sound is courtesy of Creative’s Sound Core 3D to give a higher level of audio clarity and performance than traditional on-board solutions.

The bottom edge of the board gives us a typical array of USB and front panel headers along with a power and reset button, debug LED, front panel audio and a molex power connector for supplying additional power to the board when under multi gpu arrays.

Like many other boards these days, SATA is in a good dosage with four SATA II and six SATA III ports on hand. The four red ports to the far left are handled by Marvell’s SE9230 chip set whilst the remaining six ports to the rights are taken care of by the X79 chip set itself.

Round the back on the boards I/O. the first thing that we note is the USB3.0 is in good supply with eight ports on hand. The remainder of the I/O is taken up by two eSATA ports, Firewire, dual Broadcom LAN, 7.1ch audio with optical out, legacy PS/2 keyboard and two USB2.0 ports. The upper USB2.0 port has a feature that makes it stand out from the rest in that it is a Fatal1ty gaming mouse port. 

“Fatal1ty Mouse Port is a customizable technology for PC gamers that is a part of F-Stream. After plugging the USB mouse into the Fatal1ty Mouse Port and running F-Stream, gamers can use Fatal1ty’s personal preferred mouse polling rate at 500 Hz. F-Stream also provides the flexibility for gamers to adjust the mouse polling rate from 125 Hz to 1000 Hz. This is helpful for professional gamers to experience smoother game play and faster response time to the mouse.”