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ASRock Extreme4 P67 and Fatal1ty Professional

with the P67 Extreme4 we have a board where we continue to see the evolution of ASRock from their budget and midrange roots to a strong player in the motherboard market. This latest model has a good level of build quality, using Japanese capacitors and mature components such as Marvells 912x SATA 6GB/s controller. It is also a well-designed board which has clearly been thought through when in the development stage. This is evident in decisions such as leaving an extra gap between PCIe slots to allow for good airflow on high end multi-GPU systems. Then of course there is plenty of future proof connectivity in the form of four USB 3.0 ports, two of which can be installed on the front panel and four SATA 6GB/s connectors.

moving to the Fatal1ty board we find a number of the same great features that were present on the Extreme4. These include the impressive XFast USB technology, UEFI BIOS with GUI, extra spacing between PCIe slots and on-board LED. ASRock add some nice twists such as gold capacitors and nicer PCIe and memory clips in addition to extra SATA 6GB/s ports and two additional USB 3.0 connectors however we do have to question the need for Fatal1ty branding as none of these are new ideas.

Essentially there really is nothing on this board that both worthwhile and unique to Fatal1ty and there are a number of changes which would have improved it as a product. Firstly ASRock could have bundled a Killer NIC, maybe even a Fatal1ty X-Fi to provide true hardware LAN/audio which increases gaming performance/quality. They could and should have removed IDE and floppy connectors, maybe one of the PS/2 ports from the board entirely. Then, to be completely honest, the Fatal1ty mouse port idea should have been binned at an early stage. Any gaming mouse worth using already offers multiple polling rates, adding the same setting to the motherboard is marketing gone mad. We also need to point out that having a face stare out at us from the BIOS screen, especially with a Red/Black colour scheme is distracting and harder to use than a plain background.

Izvor: hardwareheaven.com