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ASRock Fatal1ty 990FX Killer

ASRock Fatal1ty 990FX Killer Review – Sourcing an AMD motherboard is harder than finding a gamer who agreed with Steam’s attempt to commercialise mods; after reaching out to the big four, we had to beg several times for them to include an AMD board. In fact, we got this ASRock board not from ASRock, but from AMD itself, who supplied it with one of its CPUs for testing.

ASRock-Fatal1ty-990FX-Killer ASRock Fatal1ty 990FX Killer

ASRock Fatal1ty 990FX Killer, Aimed at the AMD set

As the name suggests, this board uses AMD’s premium 990FX chipset, which enables overclocking and SLI support. While the specs claim this board supports quad-SLI, a cursory glance at the board itself reveals this to be impossible, as it only has three PCIe x16 slots, limiting the board to three cards.

A single M.2 socket is included, but it’s only of the PCIe 2.0 x2 variety, so will be much slower than the cutting edge PCIe 3.0 x4 slots available elsewhere. The 8+2 phase power design is solid for a board of this price, and when combined with the numerous overclocking options in the BIOS will help users extract the most out of their AMD CPU. For the price we’re quite ok with the Purity Sound audio solution used within, which is based on the same Realtek ALC1150 chip used in ASRock’s X99 board. However, only five SATA3 ports is a little lacking, even considering there’s also a single SATAe port.

Overall this is a solid board, but when compared against the features offered on similarly priced Z97 boards is a little lacking, especially regarding M.2 and SATA support.

Pros

  • Solid power supply
  • Triple GPU support
  • Decent onboard audio

Cons

  • Only five SATA 3 ports
  • Slow M.2 connection

ASRock Fatal1ty 990FX Killer Specifications

  • Supports Socket AM3+ processors
  • 4 x DDR3 DIMM Slots
  • 7.1 CH HD Audio with Content Protection (Realtek ALC1150 Audio Codec)
  • PCIE x1 Gigabit LAN 10/100/1000 Mb/s
  • Qualcomm® Atheros® Killer™ E2200 Series
  • 3 x PCI Express 2.0 x16 Slots (PCIE2/PCIE3 @ x16 mode; PCIE5 @ x4 mode)
  • 2 x PCI Express 2.0 x1 Slots
  • Supports AMD Quad CrossFireX™, 3-Way CrossFireX™ and CrossFireX™
  • Supports NVIDIA® Quad SLI™ and SLI™
  • 5 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s Connectors, support RAID (RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1, JBOD and RAID 5), NCQ, AHCI and Hot Plug
  • 5 x USB 2.0 Ports
  • 4 x USB 3.0 Ports (ASMedia Hub)
  • ATX Form Factor

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