VR-Zone

We're still not sold on the whole Fatal1ty branding from ASRock, but the upcoming Fatal1ty X79 Professional motherboard from the company is definitely a competitor when it comes to high-end X79 motherboards. It's by far not the most feature rich X79 motherboard out there, but it still has enough features to make it an attractive choice for those that are digging the colour scheme and branding.

The board hasn't been officially unveiled as yet, but pictures of the Fatal1ty X79 Professional appeared over at TechPowerUp giving us a good idea as to what to expect. The good news is that the active cooling fan on the chipset is gone, although unlike other high-end X79 boards, ASRock didn't bother with a heatpipe connecting the chipset heatsink to the VRM heatsinks. Speaking of the VRM, we're looking at tantalum capacitors, although we don't know much else about the design of it for now.

The board has four x16 PCI Express slots in a dual x16 or quad x8 configuration and there's also a single x1 PCI Express slot and two PCI slots. ASRock went with a standard four DIMM layout on this board and there are four additional SATA 6Gbps ports in addition to the two from the chipset, as well as four SATA 3Gbps ports. Other features includes a header for two front USB 3.0 ports, a FireWire header, a Post80 debug LED and power and reset buttons.

Around the rear we have a PS/2 port, four USB 3.0 ports, five USB 2.0 ports, a Fatal1ty USB mouse port, two eSATA ports, a FireWire port, Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1-channel audio with optical and coaxial S/PDIF out and a clear CMOS button. A bracket for the front USB 3.0 ports is supplied with the board, but the rest of the bundle isn't clear at this point. No word on pricing or availability, but we wouldn't expect it to be too long.

Source: TechPowerUp