ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion and X79 Professional Review: From a Gamer to Gamers

Many thanks to...

We must thank the following companies for kindly providing hardware for our test bed:

Thank you to OCZ for providing us with the 1250W Gold Power Supply and USB testing SSD.
Thank you to Micron for providing us with the SATA testing SSD.
Thank you to G.Skill for providing us with the memory kits.
Thank you to ASUS for providing us with the AMD GPUs and some IO Testing kit.
Thank you to ECS for providing us with the NVIDIA GPUs.

Additionally, many thanks to Corsair for providing us with the Corsair H80i CLC, as this is the first time we are using this unit in motherboard testing.  The H80i is the Corsair Link enabled and updated version of the H80, the closed-loop liquid cooling system with a 120mm double width radiator.  Dustin reviewed the unit at the beginning of the year, and is currently available for $95.

Test Setup

Power Consumption

Power consumption was tested on the system as a whole with a wall meter connected to the OCZ 1250W power supply, while in a dual 7970 GPU configuration.  This power supply is Gold rated, and as I am in the UK on a 230-240 V supply, leads to ~75% efficiency > 50W, and 90%+ efficiency at 250W, which is suitable for both idle and multi-GPU loading.  This method of power reading allows us to compare the power management of the UEFI and the board to supply components with power under load, and includes typical PSU losses due to efficiency.  These are the real world values that consumers may expect from a typical system (minus the monitor) using this motherboard.

While this method for power measurement may not be ideal, and you feel these numbers are not representative due to the high wattage power supply being used (we use the same PSU to remain consistent over a series of reviews, and the fact that some boards on our test bed get tested with three or four high powered GPUs), the important point to take away is the relationship between the numbers.  These boards are all under the same conditions, and thus the differences between them should be easy to spot.

Power consumption on the ASRock boards is much lower than that of the ASUS Rampage boards, especially during OCCT loading.

Windows 7 POST Time

Different motherboards have different POST sequences before an operating system is initialized.  A lot of this is dependent on the board itself, and POST boot time is determined by the controllers on board (and the sequence of how those extras are organized).  As part of our testing, we look at the POST Boot Time - this is the time from pressing the ON button on the computer to when Windows starts loading. (We discount Windows loading as it is highly variable given Windows specific features.)  Despite the advent of Windows 8 introducing features for quick booting within several seconds, a significant number of users are still on Windows 7, where POST times usually fall in the 7-25 second range.  For a good result, we are looking for around 12 seconds when the board has two GPUs fitted (one for mITX), as per our testing.  We test both the stock boot time (with BIOS at default), and a stripped BIOS where all extra onboard controllers (LAN, USB 3.0, SATA, etc.) are disabled.

Unfortunately the Champion falls down on boot times, hitting over 20 seconds at default but saving a little grace with 16.87 seconds when stripped.  The Professional has a better time, beating the stripped Champion while at stock, and going a little further when stripped.  Neither however have great boot times.