ASRock’s X99 OC Formula Finally Gets Pictured

Anandtech have managed to nab themselves some exclusive pictures of ASRock’s flagship X99 overclocking series motherboard. The first standout thing is the design: the black and yellow colour scheme is very brave but I think it works very well – it is great to see something that is not red and black! The headline overclocking feature is the 1300W capability of the CPU socket which we’ve already covered, that 1300W is provided by 12 phases so that’s 108.3 watts per phase. Anandtech’s Ian Cuttress claims that LN2 users have been known to push up to 700W with previous platforms, such as X79, so it is possible Haswell-E could get close to 1000W given the extra 2 cores – although we’ll have to wait and see what happens once the Core i7 5960X is launched.

Fancy power delivery features aside and the rest of the board is pretty standard X99. In other words, it has just about everything: 10 SATA 6Gbps ports, dual M.2 slots (no SATA Express), four PCIe 3.0 X16 slots, 10 USB 3.0 ports and dual Gigabit controllers. We can also see ASRock’s Purity Sound 2 implementation which probably includes Realtek’s ALC1150 codec. Interestingly there’s a half-heigh mini PCIe slot next to the sound which can probably be used for a WiFi/Bluetooth combo card although we aren’t sure if this is included as standard.

In terms of overclocking features there is a superhydrophobic conformal coating for moisture protection (useful for protecting against LN2-induced condensation), there’s also frequency change buttons, voltage check points, PCIE disable switches, LN2 mode swithc and a slow-mode switch. The Clear CMOS switch is on the rear I/O (as shown below). Expect pricing to be around the $400 mark, maybe more. Stay tuned for more X99 news as we edge closer to the launch!

Source: Anandtech

Images courtesy of Anandtech