ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion and X79 Professional Review: From a Gamer to Gamers
by Ian Cutress on February 9, 2013 10:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- ASRock
- Fatal1ty
- X79
The X79 Fatal1ty boards had some small issues related to gaming worth noting in this section. Starting with the Champion, it should be noted that the fourth PCIe slot would never engage in PCIe 3.0 – even when set in the BIOS, it would drop down to PCIe 2.0 x8 in the operating system. On the Professional, PCIe 2.0 was enabled by default, meaning all the results here were performed at PCIe 2.0. To make matters worse, every now and again the Professional would reduce one of the GPUs to PCIe 1.1, requiring a restart to bring it back up to speed. This is an unfortunate set of events for any gaming motherboard.
Metro2033
Metro2033 is a DX11 benchmark that challenges every system that tries to run it at any high-end settings. Developed by 4A Games and released in March 2010, we use the inbuilt DirectX 11 Frontline benchmark to test the hardware at 2560x1440 with full graphical settings. Results are given as the average frame rate from 4 runs.
Dirt 3
Dirt 3 is a rallying video game and the third in the Dirt series of the Colin McRae Rally series, developed and published by Codemasters. Using the in game benchmark, Dirt 3 is run at 2560x1440 with Ultra graphical settings. Results are reported as the average frame rate across four runs.
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dgz - Monday, February 11, 2013 - link
Thresh is making big bucks in other areas. Their latest company provides quality product for big business.KoolAidMan1 - Sunday, February 10, 2013 - link
Warcraft 3 was bigger than Quake 3 ever was, and this is before we eve get into the massive DOTA scene. DOTA in China right now is bigger than Brood War, SC2, CS 1.6, and League Of Legends combined, and any of those individual games dwarf Quake 3 in popularity.Grubby hasn't won anything in Starcraft 2 so far, but he's been placing higher with almost every new tournament he competes in and he is a very well liked and respected player. His name on a product would easily help to sell it.
dgz - Monday, February 11, 2013 - link
While WC3 was indeed big, it was all dota after 2004-2005. You guys know it's true.Quake 3 community never consisted millions of players but it remained the ultimate duel shooter for how many years now? How many people drive F1 again?
dawp - Sunday, February 10, 2013 - link
[qouote]The Fatal1ty branded boards were ‘designed by Abit, but game-tested and approved by Fatal1ty’ up until socket 775 and FM2.[/quote]don't you mean AM2 there since FM2 wasn't around when Abit was?
TeXWiller - Sunday, February 10, 2013 - link
and ECC support. One might be able to forge workstations out of these.yzkbug - Sunday, February 10, 2013 - link
Is this you, Johnathan 'Fatal1ty" Wendel?JeBarr - Sunday, February 10, 2013 - link
Like many high end gaming boards, these two cram on the extra features that almost no gamer would ever use.Does anyone think that Johnny Wendel would use even half of the USB 3.0 and Sata III 6.0GB/s ports?
I don't.
Would even the most competitive gamer and power-user require such an amount of extra features for their at-home system?
Probably not.
I can see the need for extra PCIe x16 slots, for obvious reasons.....but legacy PCI slots on the Pro model is just ridiculous. Give me an extra PCIe 2.0 x1 or x4 slot instead. Get with the times, geez.
And how about these high end gaming boards with creative audio chip on-board? Right, because everyone knows it's such a great idea to have an audio amplifier mixed in with all the traces. I mean, seriously, just get rid of the extra unused PCI slots and put PCIe slots instead so I can add my own sound card....geez.
Tech-Curious - Sunday, February 10, 2013 - link
Yeah, I would expect a motherboard aimed particularly at gamers to be stripped down on features, with extremely high-quality components supplying the features that are important.The review sorta makes that very point, when it compares the Fatal1ty mobos to their Asus analogues -- quality over quantity of features.
That said, motherboards in general seem to be over-featured, and there is a segment of the market that would (understandably) balk at paying high-premium prices for a motherboard without all possible bells and whistles. But perhaps those two points only tend to suggest that motherboards are a bad fit for a pro-racer-style marketing campaign: motherboards don't tend to contribute all that much to the overall performance of a computer system, beyond a relatively low threshold of quality. Whatever difference motherboards do make tends to be overwhelmed by the performance attributes of other components, and so motherboard manufacturers feel compelled to add features to motherboards to differentiate their products from their competitors'.
Don't get me wrong: the motherboards reviewed in this article are high-end, performance-oriented parts, but they fit that description in large part because they use a socket-2011 chipset (and therefore they must be paired with a top-of-the-line CPU). That in itself is a bit of a head scratcher, IMO, because there's no compelling evidence to suggest that the LGA-2011 CPUs are noticeably better than the i7 3770k in a gaming context. Where the 2011 platform shines is in heavy-duty high-threaded workloads.
The long and the short of it is that ASRock's branding an LGA 2011 motherboard around a pro gamer is a little like a car company branding a luxury sedan around Jeff Gordon.
dgz - Monday, February 11, 2013 - link
Who the hell is this Jeff Gordon guy? Never heard of him. Quite a few F1 and rally guys are used to promote regular cars.JlHADJOE - Monday, February 11, 2013 - link
Which regular cars? Almost every car I know that has a racing driver's name on it has been pretty sporty.Alfa Romeo Spider Veloce Niki Lauda
Ford Mustang McLaren
Caterham JPE (Jonathan Palmer Edition)
Acura/Honda NSX Zanardi Edition
McLaren Mercedes SLR Stirling Moss
Subaru Imprezas in Colin McRae, Richard Burns and Peter Solberg editions
Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution 6.5 Tommi Makinen Edition