Fatal attraction?
ASRock is continuing to utilise its partnership with pro gamer Jonathan 'Fatal1ty' Wendel, with its first AMD-based gaming motherboard, the Fatal1ty 990FX Professional. The board reflects ASRock's customers desires to have a choice of CPU platform for their gaming systems, and integrates a number of new features, aimed specifically at gamers.
The Fatal1ty 990FX Professional is built around AMD's 990FX chipset, and as such supports AM3+ processors, including AMD's forthcoming 8-core Bulldozer chips. The board features four DDR3 DIMM slots, supporting up to 32GB of 2100MHz RAM, provides three PCI Express x16 slots with support for Quad SLI (using one PCI Express x1 slot) and CrossfireX, and offers an array of USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports
Features specific to the Fatal1ty 990FX Professional over what is offered by the AMD chipset include Xfast LAN Technology, the Fatal1ty mouse port and Fatal1ty XFast USB technology. Xfast LAN aims to reduce latency and improve network performance of games, with application prioritization and traffic shaping, which ensures that even with multiple applications using a network connection, there's no negative impact on games.
XFast USB provides a boost to USB transfer speeds, both for USB 2.0 and USB 3.0, with up to a 145 per cent improvement in transfer rates. The Fatal1ty mouse port integrates with ASRock's F-Stream software to enable users to adjust the polling rates - the default is Wendel's preferred 500Hz, but it's possible to drop that as low as 125Hz and raise it to 1000Hz. The downside is that some mice won't work with this port.
The Fatal1ty 990FX Professional is one of four Fatal1ty boards offered by ASRock - the other four using Intel chipsets - and likely won't be the last. No pricing information is available yet, but ASRock says the board will not have an 'advanced price' despite its advanced feature set.
