The Motherboard

Looking at the board, the design is very similar to the Professional version of the Fatal1ty board with the black / red color scheme going on. The bits that pop out at you, though, would have to be the heatsinks which look great in the color combination ASRock has gone for.

Moving in closer to the board, you can see our expansion slots. The setup is actually a little funny compared to other boards that go heavy on PCI-E slots; in this case we've got a single PCI-E x16 slot and three x1 slots, but also three older PCI legacy slots. I'm not sure I'm a huge fan of this setup; the fact we've only got a single x16 PCI-E slot also means that we're going to be limited to only a single video card. Of course, we always have the option for dual GPU beasts like the HD 6990 and GTX 590.

Across the bottom of the board we've got a bunch of headers including HD Audio, Com1, fan and three USB 2.0 ones. We've also got our floppy drive header on one end while the other has an LED debug and our SATA ports which we'll look at closer in a second.

Having a closer look at the bottom corner of the board, you can see our LED Debug display along with our six SATA ports. All six ports run off the Intel P67 chip, but as you may have assumed, the four black ones are SATA II while the two red ones are SATA III.

Also around this area we can see a Fatal1ty branded power and reset button that lights up red. Always a handy addition to people who are maybe testing the board outside of a case or just want to make sure everything is working the first time they put it into the case prior to hooking everything up.