Layout

At a first glance the ASRock Z87 Fatal1ty Professional leaves a very good impression with its harmonic design. The manfucaturer decided to go for a combination of black, red and gold, which suites nicely and in the end you get an aesthetic product. The layout itself is well thought and there is for example plenty of space around the CPU socket to install even todays largest CPU coolers. The fact that there are SATA connectors which have been angled by 90 degrees allow an easy installation of oversized graphics cards.



The Z87 Fatal1ty Professional comes with a digital 12 phase power design. As we've already mentioned on the feature's page, ASRock decided to chose a complex power design where there are for example three different filtering stages to get smooth and highly constant voltages. Especially when it comes to extreme overclocking, the power design can be what tipped the scales in the end.

Totally you'll find four DIMM-slots on the OC Formula. Officially supported are DDR3, 2933(OC) / 2800(OC) / 2400(OC) / 2133(OC) / 1866(OC) / 1600 / 1333 / 1066 MHz. There is engough space between the DIMM-slots and the CPU socket which means that you wont encounter compatibility problems with big coolers even when you choose to install RAM with big heatspreaders. Also supported are Xtreme Memory Profiles (XMP) in version 1.3.

On the ASRock Z87 Fatal1ty Professional the southbridge as well as current converters got separate cooling blocks. In case of the southbridge there is a single block made from aluminium, which provides appropriate cooling. A closer look at the current converters shows that there are two individual blocks connected to one another by a heatpipe. We also liked that this board is quite heavy, which is always an indicator for a high-quality product.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 14 - SiSoft Sandra 2
Page 2 - Specs and Delivery	Page 15 - UC Bench
Page 3 - Features	Page 16 - Super Pi 1M / 32M
Page 4 - Layout	Page 17 - wPrime 1024M Multi Core
Page 5 - Connectors and I/O	Page 18 - Cinebench
Page 6 - BIOS	Page 19 - Bioshock: Infinite
Page 7 - Test setup	Page 20 - Metro Last Light
Page 8 - Preview / Gallery	Page 21 - Sleeping Dogs
Page 9 - 3D Mark	Page 22 - Power Consumption
Page 10 - 3D Mark 11	Page 23 - Performance Rating
Page 11 - 3D Mark Vantage	Page 24 - Price Comparison
Page 12 - PC Mark 7	Page 25 - Conclusion
Page 13 - SiSoft Sandra 1