ASRock Fatal1ty H97 Killer Motherboard Review

[section_title title=”Closer Look”]Closer Look

Having our first look at the ASRock Fatal1ty H97 Killer there is nothing too surprising going on. The board indubitably follows the Fatal1ty design as we can see with the red heatsinks and read/black RAM and PCI slots with white retention clips.

The top half of the board houses the LGA 1150 CPU socket, 4x RAM DIMM Slots that can handle DDR3 RAM up to 1600MHz, 24 and 8 pin PSU connectors, Killer E2200 networking 5 fan headers and our rear I/O which we will have a better look at shortly.

Moving on down to the bottom; we have our PCI lanes including 1 PCIe 3.0 x16, 1 PCIe 2.0 x16, 2 PCIe 2.0 x1, 2 PCI; Purity Sound 2 which features 115dB SNR, Lower noise, Excellent bass for headphones supporting up to 600ohm headphones, PCB isolated shielding that blocks noise from other onboard components and NICHICON fine gold audio capacitors.

A closer look at our M.2 port which supports M.2 devices in 5 different lengths offering up to 10GBs transfer speeds, something I for one cannot wait to put to good use one day.

Moving on from our M.2 expansion port we have our standard SATA as well as our SATA Express ports.  One of the rather upsetting features of the M.2 / SATA Express debacle is you can only use one or the other, they will not work at the same time which is rather frustrating.

Taking a closer look at our heatsinks we can just about notice the nice sparkle they give off though these photos do not do it justice at all!

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1 PS/2 Mouse/Keyboard Port
1 x D-Sub Port
1 x DVI-D Port
1 x HDMI Port
1 x Optical SPDIF Out Port
3 x USB 2.0 Ports (Supports ESD Protection (ASRock Full Spike Protection))
1 x Fatal1ty Mouse Port (USB 2.0) (Supports ESD Protection (ASRock Full Spike Protection))
4 x USB 3.0 Ports (Supports ESD Protection (ASRock Full Spike Protection))
1 x RJ-45 LAN Port with LED (ACT/LINK LED and SPEED LED)
HD Audio Jacks: Rear Speaker / Central / Bass / Line in / Front Speaker / Microphone