ASRock X99 Fatality Motherboard Review | Level One Techs

Quick review of this X99! Yes, Kaby Lake will be out soon, but it still tops out at 4 cores and a limited number of PCIe lanes. If you're going to need a lot of cores or a lot of PCIe peripherals, X99 is still king.



This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://level1techs.com/video/asrock-x99-fatality-motherboard-review
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Great review, and a good catch on the vrm nerdy stuff. ;-)
I personally really like those boards, because of the great value for money they offer.
This one and the Taichi are both really nice middle of the road no nonsense boards.
And i think that they are pretty much offer the best feuture set at their price point.
I really like the UEFI of the Fatal1ty board aswell, nice theming, pretty straight forward, decent fan control, and board overview is pretty nice feuture.
Overclocking also pretty straight forward.

I really wished that i could currently afford one haha.
Still want to upgrade to X99.

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turned the closed captioning on for this video and saw a lot of interesting mistakes by youtube. apparently model is doing a review on a excited/exxon motherboard for can be lake.

As always a excellent review. I have the Taichi board and am surprised at how closely related these two boards are. The only problem I have with mine is the lack of support for Raid on the NVME. Also, two of the sata ports, -the two that are turned vertical on the board, share PCIE lanes with the NVME next to them. Lastly, the 1x pci slot is so close to the second 16x connection that even if your using a very thin card like a video capture card in the 1x slot then the card will touch what ever card is in the 16x slot. So like @Wendell said, if your going to use a 1x or 4x card with either board, you have to use them in the bottom PCI space.

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NVME raid support i´m not fully sure but i think this is not supported by the X99 platform in general.
But i could be wrong with that, maybe @wendell could correct me there.

Also i totally forget to mention about the G.skill TridentZ memory kits.
Those are really sollid ram kits indeed.

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yeah, nvme raid is hit and miss. I think some of the asus boards do it? But you can raid1 in windows and md in linux just fine. And on this board no contention for resources, unlike skylake w/fast nvme

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I did do raid through linux, and found out that the boot times and daily use between single use NVME vs. Raid NVME vs Single SSD vs. Raid SSD really isn't significant enough to justify raid with any of the set ups. However, I still have my boot drives for linux running on a SSD raid setup. I use the NVME for video capture and editing. I found in real world test, in what I do anyway, I don't see a gain in speed with the NVME unless I am doing something files lager than several Gbs.

I love the the Taichi and made my purchase after watching Wendell's original review. LOL, even though Wendell didn't look to enthused about the board or its features. I have been very happy with the set up and couldn't ask for more.

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The Deluxe 2 and the WS board maybe yes.
But i have seen more people having some sort of an issue to get raid working on NVME drives.
Skylake has native support for this.

Well honnestly if you look at the price of the Taichi and the futures it comes with out of the box.
You cannot really get arround it for its price point.
This particular Gaming i7 board basicly is not worth the price premium over the Taichi i guess.
Unless you really like red and black, or the Creative soundblaster software.
But other then that, it does not really has manny extra's to offer over the Taichi,
other then a onboard power and reset button.
For the rest both boards are pretty similar, decent quality components on it.
And also the funny part of the whole X99 story line of motherboards from 2014 till now.
The Asrock X99 boards seems to be the least troublesome of them all.
I see allot of reports about failling Asus X99 boards lately, and i´m not fully sure yet what that is all about.
Might be human error, but i do see some sort of a pattern in the reported issues.

Not sure if @wendell is still rocking that Asrock X99WS-E 10/G board?

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So glad to see a review of this board from you. I went all over looking for reliable reviews when I heard about this board. I got one a few months ago to replace my Asus Sabertooth because I was having bios problems involving my ram and getting a stable oc. those problems have completely gone away with the Fatality and its honestly a better all around board compared. You get the steel reinforcements, better audio, builtin wifi and bluetooth, grade A lower level components like nichicon japanese capacitors and a all the SLI bridges you could ask for!

5/5 for the board
11/5 for the review

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Yeah those 12K nichcon capacitors are pretty much the highest rated ones,
used on consumer grade motherboards today, Asus and Gigabyte use 10K caps for instance.
But its also needed with such a vrm implementation really.
60A blackwing inductors are also good.

I´m not fully sure whats up with the Asus boards lately.
The Asus X99 ROG strix gets allot of failure reports lately.
And i have not fully figured out yet whats the deal with that.
Asus Sabertooth is also a board which allot of stuff is writen about on the net in the past especially bad bios complaints.
I allways look trough forums like OCN and such and read trough all the owner topics and issues topics with certain boards.
And I make some kind of a memo for that.
I think that i have discussed this stuff a while back with @PhaseLockedLoop aswell.
He owns the mighty Asrock X99 OC Formula.
And i suppose its still rocking?

I have exally kept up with pretty much all the X99 boards released from 2014 till now.
And funny enough Asrock seems the be the one with the least complaints.
The only 2 Asrock boards i have read about cold boot problems were the X99 Extreme 4 and the X99M Fatality.
But cold boot issues has been a common issue accros manny X99 boards from diffrent brands.
And most likely easally fixed with a bios update.
For the rest i can barely find any negative complaints about Asrock X99 boards.
Other then the vrm implementation is slightly less power efficient compaired to an true 8 phase fully digital implementation on Asus boards for example.
However its still better then some of the Msi X99 boards with 8 pwm phases comming from a ISL6388 6+1 phase hybrid pwm, like the Msi X99 Tomahawk for instance.
On which they just took 4 output phases of the pwm and double those to 8 using ISL6617 phase doubler /drivers, which really makes no sense to me.
But yeah that is pretty much Msi´s way of cost reducing...
I mean only 4 output phases used from the pwm, means that you are set with an interleaving effect of only 4, which is just crap for an enthusiast platform if you ask me.
Thats why they need that manny output capacitors to deal with the ripple.
On an enthusiast platform 6 true phases doubled to 12 or 8 true phases is basicly what you want.

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Oh, your right on the price. For the features that these two boards have you can't be the price they are selling at. I have thrashed on the Taichi board during testing and it has been rock solid. I am not afraid to say that it is as solid as any consumer grade workstation board on the market.

Yeah she is still rocking.. Going solid too.. And I've given her some abuse. Wow haha you really layed it out here.. Hmm I suppose all I can add is we are seeing more failures due to feature and component density. I reckon that with every manufacturer putting everything in including the kitchen sink on these gaming boards they are having trouble with real estate and they are kinda pushing the bounds on these motherboards. Tbh for me I chose the oc formula (and boy is she a huge board).. Due to its lack of gaming features and just a straight get to the overclocking and keep the function over the form uefi. That's just my opinion.. If I have to get a motherboard nowadays it would have to be one of the simpler boards with good power delivery. Or a ws board because as I'm sure @wendell could point out these types of boards to through a different style of testing and certification.. And they might as well be rock solid for 500 to 600 dollars lol

Power delivery is pretty important to me. I like to either have a true 8 or true 6. Doubling after that doesn't matter but this is all technical.. You need it if you are gonna push higher clocks because you start tweaking things the average person nopes the fuck away from

And lol @MisteryAngel all asus doing is pulling a VAG.. (she will know what I mean) .. ALL TALK ALL FEATURES.. LOTS OF BREAKAGE LOL

There used to be a time when AsRock split off from Asus and became the little brother that offered budget versions of Asus boards because cheaper manufacturing.
Then Asus closed all of their former plants, and started producing in the same plants as AsRock, but AsRock had about a 10 year experience advantage in using those production facilities.
Now AsRock is the new Asus and Asus is overpriced non-so-good stuff. Asus went from being the best mobo manufacturer to being a generic gadget rebrander in the last 6-7 years. Asus gave up on all of their promising products over the years, killed their after sales support to basically an answering service that only says "no" and "I don't know" to customers. It used to be my favourite brand, I hacked on the WL-HDD back in the day, all my laptops and mobos were Asus for years. About 10 years ago, they started having serious quality issues with their mobos and they started killing their most interesting products. After 2010, the laptops started to have serious quality issues. Now, I don't buy Asus any more because there is always something wrong with what I buy from them, and often it's not so nice stuff, like disabled functionality that is undocumented, BIOS settings that are useless or screwed up, faked functionality that doesn't really work in reality, etc...

I haven't had that yet with AsRock and Gigabyte. Both of these mobos have been working well, and especially AsRock has shown that they implement new functionality pretty well, so that it doesn't only look good on the box, but actually works in practice. Gigabyte has also delivered, albeit sometimes after several BIOS updates, but those were pretty quick in being released, unlike Asus, and they actually solved the problems, unlike Asus.

In short, the much denigrated split-off brand of Asus, AsRock, has taken the lead Asus once had in mobos in terms of quality, reliability and functionality. That is the way I have experienced it over the course of the last decade.

With this X99 board again (just noting that Fatality products are not just a premium price for the name, but actually often are a clever cocktail of functionality for a clever price), AsRock has come up with a product that offers a pretty solid board for the price, with lots of functionality and a good build quality. Some of the obvious mistakes on Asus boards, like bad positioning of chokes and caps or handicapping certain platform advantages, are not found on AsRock boards. I have a TaiChi X99 board in a working system, and it's performing great. The Asus WS boards I got last year, have been decimated from 3 to just 1 that's still hanging on, but is also starting to crash inexplicably sometimes. They will be substituted by AsRock or Gigabyte boards, but probably AsRock.

The only thing seriously lacking, is the ex works capability to use open source BIOS. That would really be nice.

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I think that you kinda hit the nail on the head wenn saying motherboard manufacturers like Asus stuff too much gimmicky feutures on their boards that are officially not supported by the cheapset.
I think you could also callout Msi for it with certain higherend boards.
The use of too much third party controllers and sharing too much pci-e lanes,
is often where things could go wrong.
I think that the Asrock X99 Taichi is a nice feutured board that isnt too overbloated.

I did get the ASRock Fatality X99 Professional Gaming i7 (long name...) motherboard along with the 6850k. I wasn't planning on it, but my motherboard decided to die sooooooo you know sandy bridge is pretty old so had to upgrade. Luckily Micro Center by me had it and saw your video the day before! ^-^

Anyways I totally agree with your review. My experience with the motherboard has been very pleasant and happy for the purchase. I do not see any limitations with overclocking the 6850k, but than again I don't push it that hardcore. Defiantly for the price it performs great, even comparing to more premium priced motherboards.

Thanks for the great recommendation and really looking forward for your future videos.

How is your experiance with the board sofar?
Which memory configuration are you running?

Sorry for my late reply haha.

The experience with my board is great. Besides one hiccup where I had to clear the bios, it runs really smoothly and straight forward with overclocking. The bios is of course not as polished as ASUS or others, but it's pretty good. It is also able to power the CPU keeping numbers high with no stupid power delivery issues on my chip.

Sadly I only got two 8GB sticks for memory making it 16GB in total. I definitely need more and plan on it in the next month.

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Awesome thanks.
i also got this board in, and i will upgrade my systeem soon.

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