The Motherboard

Looking at the board, we're not seeing anything we haven't really seen before from a Fatal1ty board except for the fact we're dealing with a AM3 socket. The typical black and red color scheme is present and we can see the "Fatal1ty" branding throughout the board.

As we move in closer, we get a better look at the board and for some reason ASRock has chosen to include two legacy PCI slots. As we see companies move to only one and some eliminate it completely, for some reason ASRock has still chosen to include two. The placement of them is really bad as well. If you're using a dual slot video card in one of the three PCIe x16 slots, you instantly lose one of your two PCIe 1x slots. I'd rather we lost a legacy PCI than a PCIe 1x.

At some points I feel like we're going a little backwards with some of the Fatal1ty boards. It's nothing major, but the inclusion of the Floppy connector on some and two legacy PCI slots, I don't 100% agree with what's going on. Fortunately we've got three PCIe x16 slots, though, as we mentioned along with those PCIe x1 slots.

Moving across the bottom of the board, we've got a HD Audio header on the left followed with Firewire, COM1, two USB 2.0, Debug LED reader and our two Fatal1ty branded power buttons.

Turning the corner, you can see we've got a total of six SATA ports; all are SATA III and all run off the AMD SB950 chip. We've seen some companies throw on a second controller to add a few more SATA ports, but I think six is a pretty good amount, considering they're all SATA III.