Intel's Broadwell Extreme Edition ("Broadwell-E") processor line sparked a wave of refreshed X99 gaming motherboards in the summer of 2016. ASRock (spun off from Asus more than a decade ago, and now a major motherboard manufacturer) tossed its hat into the X99-refresh ring with the smart-looking ASRock X99 Tai Chi and the higher-end Fatal1ty X99 Professional Gaming i7 ($259.99). Here on the review bench today we have the latter board, which has a fundamental design similar to that of the Tai Chi, but more features and more aggressive styling.
Intel's X99 chipset has been around since 2014, but it continues to pair well with Intel's newest high-end processors. The X99 platform supports quad-channel memory and up to 40 PCI Express 3.0 lanes via the CPU, paving the way for builds that feature multiple graphics cards and PCI Express SSDs. Some gamers and enthusiasts will keep their original X99 motherboards, but others will pick up a new board to complement their new processor. (If you haven't already checked out the Broadwell-E series, take a look at our reviews of the Intel Core i7-6900K and Core i7-6950X Extreme Edition.)
The Fatal1ty X99 Professional Gaming i7 owes part of its name to professional gamer Johnathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel, an e-sports pioneer who in recent years mainly licenses his name in association with various lines of hard-core PC-gamer gear. The Fatal1ty X99 Professional Gaming i7 was available on Newegg.com when we wrote this in early November 2016 for $254, and for slightly more elsewhere. That puts it in the neighborhood of other high-end X99 boards, including the EVGA X99 FTW K, the Asus Republic of Gamers Strix X99 Gaming, and the MSI X99A Xpower Gaming Titanium. But it's a tad cheaper than those flagships.
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All of the boards we just mentioned are geared towards PC gamers and are loaded with gaming- and overclocking-related extras. The same can be said of this ASRock offering, although it has a different idea of what gamers want than the other motherboard makers, which we'll get to later in the review. One area where ASRock and the others agree is that a gaming motherboard needs style. The Fatal1ty X99 Pro is easily one of the most colorful motherboards we've seen recently, with a striking black, red, and silver color scheme.
We don't mind a loud board, so the Fatal1ty X99 Pro's colors work just fine for us, but we can't get behind the bulky red-plastic stripe on top of the heatsink above the CPU socket at the top of the board. It appears to be a different shade of red than others on the board, and as a result it looks a bit gimmicky. If the stripe lit up, it would make more sense to us. But a plastic block on a board this expensive? It goes against the "Pro" in the name, and it's a strike against the Fatal1ty X99 Professional Gaming i7.
Still, this is a board that gets most of the details right, and given the advanced X99 chipset and the rest of the deep feature set, it's something of a value model in a market niche—leading-edge gaming motherboards—where value is generally scarce.
Board Layout
The layout of the CPU socket and memory doesn't differ much from one X99 refresh motherboard to the next: The LGA 2011-v3 CPU socket sits near the center, flanked on two sides by a total of eight memory slots. The socket has a standard two-lever locking mechanism that makes installing the CPU an easy, fast process. Although many gamers will opt for liquid cooling, budget users who take the heat-sink/fan route shouldn't have any trouble finding one that fits between the memory modules easily. The board's 12 power phases, near the top of the board, also give the CPU socket a reasonable amount of breathing space.
The eight memory-module slots feature four channels and support DDR4 memory up to 3,300MHz. The slots have gold contacts and thumb locks at the top and bottom of each module. We were a little surprised to see the lower thumb locks, as they can be pretty tough to reach once a graphics card is installed in the top PCI Express x16 slot. MSI's X99A Xpower Gaming Titanium, for example, has thumb locks only at the top, making it easier to replace memory modules down the road.
ASRock made an unusual design choice with its PCI Express (PCIe) slots—one that actually ended up giving us just enough space to get our fingers down to release those thumb locks. Rather than put the PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot right at the top, it opted for a PCIe 2.0 x1 slot in the top slot position. So, as long as you don't put an add-in card in that slot, you'll have a little space between the memory and the graphics-card slot to slide your fingers in and hit those RAM-slot release locks.
ASRock didn't color-code the memory slots, which isn't unusual among X99 motherboards. But it means that you'll need to read the manual to find the appropriate channels for your memory configuration. The manual's instructions are fairly light on this topic, but they are good enough to get the job done.
The Fatal1ty X99 Professional Gaming i7 has a total of two PCIe 2.0 x1 slots and three PCIe 3.0 x 16 slots, all of which feature gold contacts. The three PCIe 3.0 slots can run in x16/x16/x0 or x16/x8/x8 configs—that is, either two graphics cards at full bandwidth with the last slot empty, or one card at full bandwidth and two others at half (x8) bandwidth. ASRock wrapped the x16 slots in metal to make them extra-tough, which is a nice touch and increasingly common on high-end boards over the past year or so. If you have heavy graphics cards and move your PC often (say, to and from LAN events), the extra support on the video-card slots will be appreciated. The board supports up to 3-Way SLI or triple CrossFireX configurations.
All of the new Intel X99 boards that we've reviewed feature an M.2/PCI Express/NVMe connector to take advantage of the jaw-dropping speed of drives like the new Samsung SSD 960 Pro. ASRock takes things a step further, though, with a second M.2 connector. One M.2 connector sits near the bottom PCI Express slot, while the other connector sits between the top PCIe x16 slot and the memory slots. You can see them both (and their yellow screw anchor points) in the image below.
The multiple screw anchors mean that you can attach an M.2 drive of any length; you aren't limited to the most common (80mm, or Type 2280) drives.
Ports and Headers
ASRock puts a reasonable number of ports on its I/O panel. The port area features typical audio jacks (including S/PDIF), along with some less common features, such as dual Gigabit Ethernet jacks and co-ax-style Wi-Fi antenna connectors. The antenna sticks themselves connect directly to the ports, rather than via a cable to an external antenna. This means that you won't be able to position them to get the best possible reception (aside from angling them on their small hinges). That might be a bigger issue on a computer that's meant to go in your living room, but a serious gaming PC will most likely be connected via an Ethernet port most of the time, anyway, so this antenna design doesn't strike us a problem.
The I/O panel has two USB 2.0 ports, four USB 3.0 ports, a USB 3.1 Type-A port and a USB 3.1 Type-C port. One of the USB 2.0 ports is labeled as the "Fatal1ty Mouse Port." ASRock pairs this particular port with software called "F-Stream" to give gamers control over their mouse polling rates. A higher polling rate means that the mouse will report its location more often, making (in the eyes of some gamers) for better gameplay in intense, competitive games like first-person shooters. This isn't going to be a critical feature for most buyers, but it doesn't hurt to have gamer-oriented tools like this one.
The I/O panel also has a Clear CMOS button, which is handy for overclockers. The button is recessed, so you won't accidentally push it while plugging in a peripheral, but it's easy enough to press with a pen or a fingernail when you need to. ASRock also included a single PS/2 port for a legacy keyboard or mouse. The entire I/O section is housed in a sturdy metal shield that is meant to protect the ports from static electricity and other threats, and it shares the "landing strip" design look of the M.2 slots.
Most of the internal headers run along the right side and bottom of the motherboard, which is typical. ASRock does an excellent job of marking its headers with easy-to-read type. We rarely needed to refer to the manual while installing the motherboard in our test system, because the labels are easy to spot.
The two buttons at the top-right corner of the board are Power and Reset buttons, letting you skip the chore of attaching your case's front panel connectors if you are encountering trouble while building or overclocking your system. They're also handy for open-air test beds. Power comes by way of the 24-pin ATX connector on the upper right side of the board and an eight-pin, 12-volt ATX power connector at the top of the board just above the heatsink. ASRock provides a CPU fan connector and a liquid-cooling-pump fan connector. (The latter can also be used as a standard fan connector.) Another three chassis-fan connectors run in a nearly straight horizontal line across the middle of the motherboard.
The Fatal1ty X99 Professional Gaming i7 has two BIOS chips, so you can switch from one to the other if you scramble up your primary BIOS. The BIOS-selector switch is large and well-marked, so you can easily flip from A BIOS to B BIOS with your finger. ASRock also puts the audio header and a Clear CMOS header at the bottom of the board, along with the front-panel header pins and the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) connectors. Two USB 2.0 headers sitting at the bottom of the board support a total of four extra USB 2.0 ports. The two vertically mounted USB 3.0 headers sit on the side of the board near the power connector.
Although it's typical to see headers facing horizontally off the side of modern motherboards (generally for better cable management), ASRock largely stuck to vertical header placement. The only ports that face horizontally are the SATA connectors, which are stacked in two rows on the right side of the motherboard...
You get a total of 10 SATA 3 connectors, eight of which are on the side of the board, with two more sitting just above the X99 chipset. The board also has a SATA Express connector that co-opts the nearest two standard SATA3 connectors (#4 and #5) when a SATA Express device is attached. That said, we're not sure what you might plug into it; a couple of years after these ports started appearing, we're still waiting to see a SATA Express drive that you can actually buy.
The motherboard also has a digital debug display with the best name we have seen for a debug readout so far: "Dr. Debug." It's in the lower right corner of the board, which made it a little harder to see in our test system than the displays of other motherboards, which typically house them in the upper right.
ASRock has gone out of its way to assure gamers that its motherboard has the quality to match its price tag. It points out that the board is created on Sapphire black PCB with copper inner layers. The capacitors have Nichicon platinum caps, and the graphics-card connectors are (as we mentioned earlier) wrapped in metal to provide better durability and support (a feature the company calls "Steel Slots"). It also doesn't hurt that the board has those dozen power phases, which is a nod to gamers who want to overclock.
Accessories
ASRock ships the Fatal1ty X99 Professional Gaming i7 with some worthwhile accessories. The box contains four Serial ATA cables, two antennas, the I/O plate, and three SLI bridges, along with the driver/software disc. The box also includes a motherboard manual and a separate BIOS manual.
Two of the SATA connectors have angled headers, which can make for easier cable management in cases that have motherboard tray pass-throughs near the edge of the board (such as the SilverStone Redline RL05). The included high-bandwidth SLI bridge (labeled "HB Bridge") is a nice touch. You'll want to use it when pairing two of Nvidia's newest SLI-capable video cards, such as the GeForce GTX 1080.
The only motherboard accessory we missed was a header "convenience adapter" for the pins that run the front-panel LEDs and the power/reset buttons. Motherboard makers sometimes toss in a small adapter that stands between the fine cables for your case's front-panel buttons and status LEDs and the pinouts on the board. (The most notable is the Asus implementation, called the Q-Connector.) Once those individual connectors are attached to the adapter, you can plug the adapter into the front-panel connectors on the motherboard in one move. Given that the front-panel headers had the only labels on the motherboard that we had a hard time reading, a header adapter would have been a nice touch here, and one that's appropriate for a board at this price point.
Build Details
We built a complete gaming PC around the ASRock Fatal1ty X99 Professional Gaming i7 to see how the motherboard's layout affects a build. Although you probably won't need access to the CPU socket backplate, you shouldn't have any trouble reaching it, in most desktop cases. The motherboard-tray cutout in our SilverStone Primera PM01 gave us plenty of room to reach it.
Our Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition processor went in without a hitch, and we had our Thermaltake Water 2.0 Pro liquid cooler attached to the CPU socket in minutes. We also installed a matched kit of four 8GB G.Skill Trident Z DDR4 memory modules (32GB total) and an XFX Radeon R7 370 Double Dissipation Black Edition video card. Dedicated graphics is a necessity here, as the E-Series processors designed for X99 motherboards lack integrated graphics.
Our test build also included a 240GB ADATA Premier SP550 SSD (that's a 2.5-inch SATA drive), a 1TB Western Digital Blue 10EZEX hard drive, and a 1,000-watt Corsair RM1000x power supply.
The motherboard manual does a reasonable job of identifying ports and providing instructions for installing important parts like the processor and memory. That said, it is surprisingly short and doesn't include as many illustrations and other information as some of the manuals we have seen on other X99 motherboards.
We do like the separate Software Setup Guide, which has lots of screenshots of the BIOS and has a reasonable amount of instruction to get would-be overclockers up and running. This guide also covers the F-Stream peripheral-customization utility, which we mentioned earlier.
ASRock includes a few programs for Windows on its driver disc. (They're also available on its Web site.) One of these is Creative's Sound Blaster Cinema 3, which offers audio tuning for gaming and video playback. ASRock backs up this software with a Realtek ALC1150 audio codec, which offers 7.1 channel audio.
ASRock includes a three-month license for XSplit Broadcaster and XSplit Gamecaster, so you can share your best gaming moments with friends. The motherboard maker also offers ASRock Live Update & App Shop, giving you another avenue for downloading drivers and software.
The BIOS: A Brief Look
ASRock does a nice job of organizing important information on the main page of its BIOS, which is in EZ Mode by default. Important stats for your processor, memory, and storage devices are lined up on the left side of the page, with critical temperatures and an animated fan-status graphic taking up much of the second half. The boot-device priority list also appears on this page.
We noticed an issue with our G.Skill Trident Z memory (kit F4-3200ZC16Q-32FTZSK) as soon as we opened the BIOS. Only 16GB of the total 32GB appeared on the main screen. Our kit doesn't appear on ASRock's list of approved memory modules, but we were nonetheless surprised to see that the main page listed only two of the four DIMMs. Reseating and shuffling the modules had no effect, nor did flashing the BIOS to version 1.40, which was geared toward improving "DRAM compatibility," according to its description.
Interestingly, though, all four modules appeared when we opened the Tools menu from the main page and selected the System Browser. Here, the browser displayed each module's capacity, speed, and timings. They also appeared in the DRAM Tweaker feature. Given that the BIOS recognized the memory accurately in those menus, we think that the BIOS still has some compatibility issues for ASRock to address.
The Advanced Mode is also well-organized, and, of course, offers much more granular customization. ASRock breaks your options down by components in the Advanced tab, but if you're planning to overclock, you'll want the OC Tweaker tab. You can adjust individual CPU settings yourself, or you can choose from several profiles that have popular (and somewhat modest) OC targets.
We like these profiles because they give you a reasonably safe way to overclock without much experience. That's not to say it's completely risk-free; we managed to crash our system at one point. But the Clear CMOS button on the I/O panel had us back up in no time, and without having to reach inside the system for the tiny Clear CMOS jumper. We also like that you can choose from CPU-only profiles or CPU and XMP profiles, which simultaneously juice your memory.
The Advanced section also offers BIOS-flashing utilities, basic security features, and a full page of boot options that go way beyond the simple boot-priority tool in EZ Mode. ASRock also tucked a robust fan-tuning tool in the Hardware Monitor ("H/W Monitor") tab.
The BIOS also has a Favorites tool to help you find features you use frequently. Click the My Favorite star on any list, and you can access it again from anywhere by clicking an ever-present My Favorite button by the same name.
Conclusion
ASRock made solid design choices with the Fatal1ty X99 Professional Gaming i7, but the board has more of a scrappy, budget-gamer feel than the luxury boards we've seen of late. That's not a bad thing, though, considering this board's price.
We always appreciate hardware makers looking out for our wallets, and we think many gamers will be happy to take the $100 (or thereabouts) that they'll save over true luxury boards (such as the MSI X99A Gaming Titanium) and plow it into their CPU or GPU upgrades.
We're not ignoring the perks that the Fatal1ty X99 Professional Gaming i7 lacks. If you're a fan of case lighting, you're on your own there: The board doesn't have LED lighting-strip controllers or connector pins, nor does it have any decorative onboard LEDs. The paint job is flashy, but that won't be enough for some prospective buyers. But these missing features don't affect the Fatal1ty X99 Professional Gaming i7's capabilities (or its performance), and so we're weighting them accordingly when considering the board's overall value.
It's easy to like the Fatal1ty X99 Professional Gaming i7. The board has plenty of internal headers and external ports, including USB 3.1 Type-A and Type-C ports, along with two M.2 connectors and support for two-card SLI with new, Nvidia Pascal-based cards or three cards with older SLI-capable boards or Radeon iron. The included high-bandwidth SLI bridge will also save gamers who just spent several hundred dollars on new high-end Nvidia cards a decent chunk of change. We've seen that these bridges can make a difference in frame rates, particularly at 4K resolutions, and they sell for about $40 online. So we appreciate that the company bundles one in the box. It also doesn't hurt that ASRock throws in gamer-friendly software like XSplit. If you're on a budget, but still planning a high-end gaming-focused build, this motherboard is a sensible choice, and some of the included accessories—hardware and software alike—may make the overall value proposition that much better.
This scrappy X99 motherboard comes in at a lower price than many luxury boards, but still supports tri-SLI, USB 3.1, two M.2 connectors, and is loaded with plenty of gaming features.
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