ASRock Fatal1ty X99X Killer Motherboard Review

[section_title title=”Closer Look Cont.”]Closer Look Cont.

Running across the very bottom of the motherboard is a good selection of ports, connectors, switches and buttons. Starting off on the left this is where users will find things like the TBT and Com ports, clear CMOS jumper, BIOS select switch – which comes in handy when overclocking.

Over on the right side of the board are a pair of USB2.0 headers, fan headers, power and reset buttons so users don’t need to connect the front panel power switch to the board if they want to play around with overclocking outside of a case. We can also see the HDD Saver port which is covered by a nice sticker and the DeBug LED which will give us a unique code if we run into any problems during POST.

The LGA 2011-3 socket is compatible with Intel i7 and XEON 18-core CPUs, offering some major power!

On the top of the motherboard hiding behind the mosfets heatsink is the 8pin CPU power port and we can also see the bridge connecting the 2 heatsinks together to help dissipate heat if one is pulling in more heat than the other.

Something some of you may have noticed was this lovely little port in between the bottom 2 PCIe slots, this is a Mini-PCI Express slot that can be used with certain expansion cards.

The rear IO has our normal host of goodies on it, none of which include any video outputs as you will need a dedicated graphics card.

The rear IO consists of:

– 1 x PS/2 Mouse/Keyboard Port
– 1 x Optical SPDIF Out Port
– 1 x eSATA Connector
– 1 x USB 2.0 Port (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 (ASMedia ASM1074 hub) (Supports ESD Protection (ASRock Full Spike Protection))
– 2 x USB 3.0 Ports (ASMedia ASM1042) (Supports ESD Protection (ASRock Full Spike Protection))
– 2 x RJ-45 LAN Ports with LED (ACT/LINK LED and SPEED LED)
– 1 x Clear CMOS Switch
– HD Audio Jacks: Rear Speaker / Central / Bass / Line in / Front Speaker / Microphone