ASRock has released another good looking board with the Fatal1ty branding, this time sporting the Z77 Chipset. The digital 16+8 VRM allows us to overclock the CPU to extreme speeds while on LN2 and the supported memory goes up to 2800+.

The board also comes with plenty of connectivity options like dual video outputs (HDMI, DisplayPort), no less than 6 USB 3.0 ports in the back and other 6 USB 2.0, dual LAN; for the front panel, we also have one internal USB 3.0 header and two other USB 2.0.

For people that want to keep their old heatsink/CPU water block, the manufacturer has also drilled extra holes for LGA775, a feature named by ASRock C.C.O. .

The first two PCI Express x16 3.0 slots were designed in such a way so we could fit two video cards even with triple-slot cooling systems.

With the coming of the Ivy Bridge chipset series, the UEFI interface has been redesigned and now we have even a better looking interface, featuring System Browser, O.M.G., or Internet Flash.

For getting the most out of our system, ASRock has included applications like XFast LAN for traffic shaping and minimizing ping times, XFast RAM for creating a RAMDrive and offloading the temporary, cache files there and XFast USB for enhancing USB bus speeds.

Regarding the system performance results with this board, it seems we have another winner, this board succeeding to defeat the motherboards tested in the past in most of the benchmarks.

We have enumerated a lot of positive features of the products; like all hardware items in the past there are some negatives too. First, we could say that the central "Fatal1ty Gaming Gear" heatsink is a little too tall; this also means that we are limited when choosing a board to fit in that first x1 slot. Secondly, we would have liked to see removed the legacy IDE and Floppy interfaces, because most gamers today will be tempted very much to use the faster SATA interfaces for SSDs or larger capacity HDDs. By eliminating these we think that there was enough space to fit a mSATA port and maybe an extra USB 2.0 header.

The board can be found in online stores for about 210 Euros.

ASRock Fatal1ty Z77 Professional Motherboard Recommended For:

I would like to thank again to ASRock for making this review possible!