welcome to an unboxing that many of you have requested this is the ASRock
fatality Professional Series z77
motherboard so this is an LGA 1155 board using the z77 chipset which means You'
got support for all the latest features including third generation Intel core
processors NVIDIA SLI ATI AMD Crossfire
X technology Windows 7 which is sort of not really the latest as well as a bunch
of other stuff so they've got 555 which I guess is better than gigabytes 333
maybe that's what they were going for here so five times land speed five times
USB speed and five times system speed
with xast RAM xfast USB and xfast Lan um
okay so you can Photoshop apparently up to five times faster xfast RAM will
create oh that's cool no no this might actually be cool okay so xfast RAM will
create a virtual disc from the system memory to boost the performance for Photoshop it can even perform five times
faster than before neat lower latency in games with asrock's motherboard with
xfast land versus other motherboard without it and USB comparison uh five
times faster although they don't really say why powered by fnet okay high
performance this is a feature of lucid virtue MVP which is an updated version
of virtue while allowing switchable Graphics so you can get the best of your
dedicated graphics part card and your onboard graphics card as well as virtual
vsync which um I don't know I tried it felt like there
was more input legs so I didn't really like it that much and high performance which adds performance to some games
using the onboard VGA on your CPU Smart
Connect technology rapid start technology turn on really fast as well as a bunch of other cool stuff premium
gold caps yes they are goldplated very cool digital power design 16 plus 8
power phase design uh capable of four
dims at up to 2800 MHz plus and the
fatality Mouse Port is pretty cool because what it allows you to do is
automatically customize the pulling raate and other features of the mouse
port to be the same as what Jonathan fatality wendle
uses you can play
Quake no but seriously I've seen him play he's much much better than me I
don't mean to be ragging on the guy it's just that I think you should for things
like Mouse settings I think you should find what works for you that's all I
don't think that necessarily using the same polling rate on your USB port is
going to dramatically improve your gameplay however that doesn't take away
from the fact that this looks like an absolutely beastly motherboard with a
very very complete accessory package by the look of things so let us continue
moving on with the fatality professional
z77 so first you got your quick installation guide which ironically is
about 8 m thick um you've also got a utility DVD
download the latest from the azrock website six SATA port uh SATA ports uh
SATA cables an IO Shield that is handly
color coordinated and apparently there's a lot of different outputs on this motherboard so we're going to check that
out two Molex TOA adapters these are super handy even if you don't use them
for this build you might run into a use for them sometime in the
future also got oh okay that's just a hard hard SLI Bridge we've also got a
front USB 3 uh 3 and 1/2 in to internal
header this is super handy it's great that it comes with it and you can even
unscrew it from the 3 and 1/2 in Bay piece and put it onto an IO shield and
use it for the back of your case if you already have front USB 3 so that's
really really neat a couple of more guides as well as a software setup guide
and now let's have a look at the board itself so it's got a very unique look
it'll go really well with your fatality 1000 W power supply where is that oh you
know what we actually did an episode on the ncixcom channel not that long ago
about color coordinating your build where we had an ASUS Crosshair 5 formula
and the fatality power supply we had Radeon 7970 graphics cards red LED
lighting it looked absolutely amazing so a board like this on the Intel side
would go great with a build like that uh so here we go we got our goldplated
capacitors we've got our lg1155 CPU socket remember this is
compatible with second gen Sandy Bridge or third gen Ivy Bridge Intel core
processors these memory slots as I mentioned before support up to DDR3 2800
MHz look at that an ID Port when's the
last time you saw an ID Port I mean azrock has really gone all out to
include everything I mean maybe Jonathan has like an IDE optical drive that he
really likes I do I have I have one of those BenQ ones that was like the
epitome of optical drives and it's IDE I haven't had a board I can use it on in
ages so there you go maybe he has one too um so we've got an eight pin power
connector in the top of the board and its ideal location 24 pin power
connector along the right hand edge of the board in its similarly ideal
location front USB 3.0
Port um six say to 36 gbit per second
ports with four SATA 3 or SATA 2 3 gbit
per second ports and uh for better performance we
suggest ports 0 to 5 is boot devices so that's these ones remember Port 0 to 5
is 1 to six in sort of real people terms
so these are the ones running off the Intel controller these guys are running
off of what is evidently an as media controller all right onboard power
buttons also fatality themed power and reset onboard post debugging LED we've
also got front usb2 front fire wire our front panel
connectors which are helpfully labeled uh we've got really a floppy
connector C can you install Quake off a floppy Drive
I'm not actually sure it's a pretty old game um check this out though we've got
a plx bridge on here so you should be able to see some pretty intelligent
switching of the PCI Express Lanes it's really tricky the more stuff you build
in to these z77 boards whether it's third party chipsets for SATA whether
it's more USB 3 whether it's additional PCI Express slots the trickier it gets
for this the onboard CPU PCI Express controller to manage it so the plx chip
I'm not sure what it's working on over there but it's probably just allowing it
to get the best performance possible these chips aren't cheap so there you go
it's on the board in terms of PCI Express slots we've got two PCI e1x two
PCI and three PCI e6x although please
note this one's only wired for 4X and is only really going to be fully functional
and like basically I wouldn't put anything too demanding in it like a
graphics card um unless you're running an ivy Bridge CPU and even then it's not
going to be ideal for all intents and purposes this is a two-way SLI and
two-way Crossfire comp board that is two cards you can still run quad SLI and qu
quad Crossfire with dual GPU cards this one is only at adex but
remember this is 8x PCIe 3.0 so that means you've got the same bandwidth as
PCIe 2.0 16x so you're going to get full performance out of two cards going here
front audio is over here in its ideal location and you got a you know what
let's have a look at like the cooling solution that we got going on here get
some close-ups of that it looks pretty good uh Jonathan signed it over
here got some more beefy aluminum heat sinks going on over here he wants me to
keep turning it I think I don't know what you're talking
about fans oh fans good thinking um apparently this means fans
according to Slick which is like sort of abstract but whatever uh so we've got
one uh
two two four pin pwm fan headers and
then one two
three pin no four three pin fan headers
so um mostly done by three pin 2 pwm
personally to me it doesn't make much of a difference I very rarely plug fans into my motherboard anyway CU I usually
use a real fan controller but there you go now you
know yeah that's right okay good job thanks lick uh on the back you find not
really much of note other than a back plate and then oh and some via chip cool
now let's have a look at what we've got in terms of IO we have lots of different
IO so we have six USB 3.0 ports speaking of adding extra things you know like
more USB 3 we've also got a PS2 keyboard mouse combo Port these are huge if you
have a high-end keyboard that only runs on PS2 and a lot of the mechanical ones
do you're going to make sure to get one of these PS2 ports HDMI and DisplayPort
out cover your digital display out options remember if you want to run the
onboard Graphics in addition to your dedicated graphics card in order to take
advantage of Quicks sync which allows you to quickly encode video or transcode
video you will want to run off of one of these or over here you just have to make
sure the software is connected correctly uh six USB 2.0 ports eata fire
wire dual gigabit landan optical audio out as well as 5.1 audio or 7.1 rather
audio out via analog uh I think I never
mentioned the front USB 3 header that's running off the Intel chipset and and
this is like I said one of the more complete boards I've seen in a very long
time I mean even to the point where it's got like floppy and IDE connectors on it
very cool so you can connect a grand total of like two drives here 10 drives
here and like a floppy Drive don't forget to subscribe to L's techtips for
more unboxings reviews and other computer videos