Asrock Fatal1ty Z77 Gaming Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,846 words · ~9 min read
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welcome to an unboxing that many of you have requested this is the ASRock
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fatality Professional Series z77
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motherboard so this is an LGA 1155 board using the z77 chipset which means You'
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got support for all the latest features including third generation Intel core
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processors NVIDIA SLI ATI AMD Crossfire
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X technology Windows 7 which is sort of not really the latest as well as a bunch
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of other stuff so they've got 555 which I guess is better than gigabytes 333
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maybe that's what they were going for here so five times land speed five times
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USB speed and five times system speed
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with xast RAM xfast USB and xfast Lan um
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okay so you can Photoshop apparently up to five times faster xfast RAM will
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create oh that's cool no no this might actually be cool okay so xfast RAM will
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create a virtual disc from the system memory to boost the performance for Photoshop it can even perform five times
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faster than before neat lower latency in games with asrock's motherboard with
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xfast land versus other motherboard without it and USB comparison uh five
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times faster although they don't really say why powered by fnet okay high
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performance this is a feature of lucid virtue MVP which is an updated version
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of virtue while allowing switchable Graphics so you can get the best of your
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dedicated graphics part card and your onboard graphics card as well as virtual
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vsync which um I don't know I tried it felt like there
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was more input legs so I didn't really like it that much and high performance which adds performance to some games
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using the onboard VGA on your CPU Smart
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Connect technology rapid start technology turn on really fast as well as a bunch of other cool stuff premium
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gold caps yes they are goldplated very cool digital power design 16 plus 8
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power phase design uh capable of four
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dims at up to 2800 MHz plus and the
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fatality Mouse Port is pretty cool because what it allows you to do is
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automatically customize the pulling raate and other features of the mouse
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port to be the same as what Jonathan fatality wendle
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uses you can play
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Quake no but seriously I've seen him play he's much much better than me I
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don't mean to be ragging on the guy it's just that I think you should for things
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like Mouse settings I think you should find what works for you that's all I
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don't think that necessarily using the same polling rate on your USB port is
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going to dramatically improve your gameplay however that doesn't take away
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from the fact that this looks like an absolutely beastly motherboard with a
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very very complete accessory package by the look of things so let us continue
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moving on with the fatality professional
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z77 so first you got your quick installation guide which ironically is
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about 8 m thick um you've also got a utility DVD
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download the latest from the azrock website six SATA port uh SATA ports uh
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SATA cables an IO Shield that is handly
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color coordinated and apparently there's a lot of different outputs on this motherboard so we're going to check that
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out two Molex TOA adapters these are super handy even if you don't use them
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for this build you might run into a use for them sometime in the
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future also got oh okay that's just a hard hard SLI Bridge we've also got a
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front USB 3 uh 3 and 1/2 in to internal
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header this is super handy it's great that it comes with it and you can even
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unscrew it from the 3 and 1/2 in Bay piece and put it onto an IO shield and
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use it for the back of your case if you already have front USB 3 so that's
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really really neat a couple of more guides as well as a software setup guide
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and now let's have a look at the board itself so it's got a very unique look
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it'll go really well with your fatality 1000 W power supply where is that oh you
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know what we actually did an episode on the ncixcom channel not that long ago
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about color coordinating your build where we had an ASUS Crosshair 5 formula
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and the fatality power supply we had Radeon 7970 graphics cards red LED
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lighting it looked absolutely amazing so a board like this on the Intel side
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would go great with a build like that uh so here we go we got our goldplated
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capacitors we've got our lg1155 CPU socket remember this is
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compatible with second gen Sandy Bridge or third gen Ivy Bridge Intel core
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processors these memory slots as I mentioned before support up to DDR3 2800
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MHz look at that an ID Port when's the
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last time you saw an ID Port I mean azrock has really gone all out to
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include everything I mean maybe Jonathan has like an IDE optical drive that he
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really likes I do I have I have one of those BenQ ones that was like the
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epitome of optical drives and it's IDE I haven't had a board I can use it on in
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ages so there you go maybe he has one too um so we've got an eight pin power
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connector in the top of the board and its ideal location 24 pin power
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connector along the right hand edge of the board in its similarly ideal
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location front USB 3.0
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Port um six say to 36 gbit per second
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ports with four SATA 3 or SATA 2 3 gbit
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per second ports and uh for better performance we
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suggest ports 0 to 5 is boot devices so that's these ones remember Port 0 to 5
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is 1 to six in sort of real people terms
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so these are the ones running off the Intel controller these guys are running
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off of what is evidently an as media controller all right onboard power
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buttons also fatality themed power and reset onboard post debugging LED we've
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also got front usb2 front fire wire our front panel
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connectors which are helpfully labeled uh we've got really a floppy
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connector C can you install Quake off a floppy Drive
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I'm not actually sure it's a pretty old game um check this out though we've got
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a plx bridge on here so you should be able to see some pretty intelligent
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switching of the PCI Express Lanes it's really tricky the more stuff you build
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in to these z77 boards whether it's third party chipsets for SATA whether
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it's more USB 3 whether it's additional PCI Express slots the trickier it gets
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for this the onboard CPU PCI Express controller to manage it so the plx chip
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I'm not sure what it's working on over there but it's probably just allowing it
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to get the best performance possible these chips aren't cheap so there you go
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it's on the board in terms of PCI Express slots we've got two PCI e1x two
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PCI and three PCI e6x although please
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note this one's only wired for 4X and is only really going to be fully functional
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and like basically I wouldn't put anything too demanding in it like a
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graphics card um unless you're running an ivy Bridge CPU and even then it's not
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going to be ideal for all intents and purposes this is a two-way SLI and
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two-way Crossfire comp board that is two cards you can still run quad SLI and qu
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quad Crossfire with dual GPU cards this one is only at adex but
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remember this is 8x PCIe 3.0 so that means you've got the same bandwidth as
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PCIe 2.0 16x so you're going to get full performance out of two cards going here
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front audio is over here in its ideal location and you got a you know what
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let's have a look at like the cooling solution that we got going on here get
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some close-ups of that it looks pretty good uh Jonathan signed it over
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here got some more beefy aluminum heat sinks going on over here he wants me to
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keep turning it I think I don't know what you're talking
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about fans oh fans good thinking um apparently this means fans
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according to Slick which is like sort of abstract but whatever uh so we've got
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one uh
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two two four pin pwm fan headers and
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then one two
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three pin no four three pin fan headers
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so um mostly done by three pin 2 pwm
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personally to me it doesn't make much of a difference I very rarely plug fans into my motherboard anyway CU I usually
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use a real fan controller but there you go now you
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know yeah that's right okay good job thanks lick uh on the back you find not
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really much of note other than a back plate and then oh and some via chip cool
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now let's have a look at what we've got in terms of IO we have lots of different
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IO so we have six USB 3.0 ports speaking of adding extra things you know like
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more USB 3 we've also got a PS2 keyboard mouse combo Port these are huge if you
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have a high-end keyboard that only runs on PS2 and a lot of the mechanical ones
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do you're going to make sure to get one of these PS2 ports HDMI and DisplayPort
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out cover your digital display out options remember if you want to run the
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onboard Graphics in addition to your dedicated graphics card in order to take
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advantage of Quicks sync which allows you to quickly encode video or transcode
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video you will want to run off of one of these or over here you just have to make
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sure the software is connected correctly uh six USB 2.0 ports eata fire
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wire dual gigabit landan optical audio out as well as 5.1 audio or 7.1 rather
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audio out via analog uh I think I never
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mentioned the front USB 3 header that's running off the Intel chipset and and
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this is like I said one of the more complete boards I've seen in a very long
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time I mean even to the point where it's got like floppy and IDE connectors on it
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very cool so you can connect a grand total of like two drives here 10 drives
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here and like a floppy Drive don't forget to subscribe to L's techtips for
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