The Board

Umm...anyone else having a moment of Dejà vu? I know I am just from looking at this board. But all that aside, I have to admit the board is pretty good looking. It has a flash combination of colors with the black PCB, gold caps and red pretty much everywhere else.

Starting off in the upper right hand corner of the board (as it would look mounted in a case), we find the RAM slots in the typical spot. The 24-Pin ATX power connector is up here also and a legacy PATA port as well.

The area around the CPU socket is also pretty clean with what looks like some serious trace tuning going from the CPU to the RAM. In case you did not know, ASRock has made sure that you will never forget that this is the Fatal1ty Profess1onal P67. The emblems are all around the CPU socket. The gold capacitors also stand out quite nicely here.

The 8-pin aux connector is in a little bit of an awkward place still, but manageable. One thing we do want to point out (and this might just be our board); the Fatal1ty signature emblem was coming off and had to be remounted after I bumped it. I would recommend checking these before you mount this board in your case.

The peripheral slots are well laid out and appear to be aimed at the high-end gamer. After all, you have a single PCIe x1 slot above the primary PCIe x16 slot and then two more double spaced PCIe x16 slots below that. Unfortunately you are not going to get dual or three-way x16 here. If you run a single GPU in the primary slot you get full x16 there. With any other PCIe card in the other x16 mechanical slots this drops back to x8. If you try to run Three-way SLI or Crossfire you end up with dual x8 and one x4. At that point you have to wonder if it is worth the extra effort (to have three GPUs).

Now that we have made it all the way around the board, we find a pair of board mounted power and reset switches, diagnostic LEDs, ten SATA ports (six SATA 3.0 and four SATA-II). The Cougar Point MCP is covered by a large heatsink which is topped with Fatal1ty's logo (just in case you forgot).

The I/O ports on the back look fairly normal. There is one item that is not normal. If you look at the red USB ports and in particular the top one you will find something out of the ordinary, even if it looks mundane. This is the Fatal1ty mouse port; it is supposed to operate at a 1000MHz polling rate which should get you very smooth mouse movements. Well, that is if your mouse supports that. We will talk a little more about this port and how well it works later.