ASRock 

No stranger to the fray, ASRock is ready with the launch of two boards, the X399 Professional Gaming and X399 Taichi. Both boards share features but have enough differences to separate them in the product stack. The Pro Gaming adds 10 Gigabit Ethernet to its two Gigabit NICs and supports Creative Sound Blaster Cinema 3, while the Taichi aims to be a more mid-range board, by sticking with dual Gigabit NICs and uses Purity Sound 4. The styling is a little different too.

ASRock X399 Professional Gaming 

The high-end board from ASRock will be the Professional Gaming. It also carries the Fatal1ty name, due to ASRock’s never-ending association with a pro-gamer from the turn of the century.

 

On the aesthetic side, the X399 Professional Gaming has a black PCB accented with gray heatsinks and grey stenciling where the M.2 slots are located. The memory slots are black, along with the rear IO cover that extends down the board. There are two heatsinks to cool the VRMs, connected by a heatpipe, and one reaches near to the rear IO. The chipset heatsink is not connected as part of the VRM cooling, but consumes a fairly large portion of the board and looks a bit like a play button. As with the fascination with RGB, the Professional Gaming has a few under the chipset heatsink. Users can add more RGB LEDs via two headers, and control them all through ASRock's RGB LED application.

The Professional Gaming has support for both NVIDIA 4-Way SLI and AMD 4-Way Crossfire with full-length PCIe slots. These have additional reinforcement to prevent sag or bending due to heavy PCIe cards during transit – the reinforcement is what ASRock calls its ‘Steel Armor’. The PCIe slots give an x16/x8/x16/x8 configuration from top to bottom, using 48 of the 60 PCIe lanes from the processor. The rest of the lanes are allocated to storage: there are a total of three M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 slots, one of which is shared/switched with a U.2 connector. For other storage, there are eight SATA ports from the chipset that natively support RAID 0/1/10.

 

For added features, the X399 Professional Gaming jumps past the ever-present Gigabit Ethernet and uses an Aquantia AQC107 10 Gigabit LAN controller to appeal to users that want to invest in 10GbE. This is paired with two Intel I211AT network controllers, and all three can do regular gigabit Ethernet duties. If three Ethernet ports were not enough, also included is an integrated Intel AC8265 2x2 802.11a/b/g/n/ac WiFi module, to handle wireless duties.

ASRock provided chipset diagram for the Pro Gaming to show how it breaks down all the bandwidth:

For power delivery, ASRock uses a digital 11 phase International Rectifier solution, along with IR DrMOS for monitoring VRM current and temperature. Distributing power to the VRMs are two EPS 12V connectors, an 8-pin and a 4-pin, although the system will work with only the 8-pin installed. Typically we see EPS connectors oriented close to each other at the top of the motherboard, but here the connectors are located on opposite sides of the socket. As shown above, the 8-pin is in the upper right-hand corner above the DIMM slots, while the supplemental 4-pin is in the more familiar location at the top left-hand corner. ASRock asserts this creates a wider trace for the CPU VRM, bringing better power delivery efficiency and lowering temperatures. 

For USB connectivity, the Professional Gaming has three USB 3.1 (10 Gbps) Type-A ports on the rear, one USB 3.1 (10 Gbps) Type-C port on the rear, two USB 3.1 (5 Gbps) headers for front panel ports, and two USB 2.0 headers for front panel ports.

Fatal1ty X399 Professional Gaming
Warranty Period 3 Years
Product Page Link
Price $439.99
Size ATX
CPU Interface TR4
Chipset AMD X399
Memory Slots (DDR4) Eight DDR4 Slots, up to 3600 MT/s
Supporting 128GB
Quad Channel
Network Connectivity 1 x Aquantia AQC107 10 Gigabit LAN
2 x Intel I211AT GbE
Wireless Network 802.11 ab/g/n/ac Dual-Band (2.4/5 GHz)
Bluetooth 4.2
Onboard Audio Realtek ALC1220
PCIe Slots 4 x PCIe 3.0 (x16/x8/x16/x8) from CPU
2 x PCIe 2.0 x1 from Chipset
Onboard SATA 8 x SATA 6 Gbps
Supporting RAID 0/1/5/10
Onboard SATA Express None
Onboard M.2 3 x PCIe 3.0 x4 - NVMe or SATA
Onboard U.2 1 x PCIe 3.0 x4 (disables M2_1 when in use)
USB 3.1 1 x Type-A , 1 x Type-C (Rear Panel)
USB 3.0 8 x Rear Panel, 4 x via internal headers
USB 2.0 4 x via internal headers
Power Connectors 1 x 24-pin ATX
1 x 8-pin CPU
1 x 4-pin CPU
Fan Headers 1 x CPU 1A/12W Max. (4-pin)
1 x CPU Opt/Water Pump 1.5A/18W Max. (4-pin)
2 x Chassis (4-pin)
1 x Chassis Opt/Water Pump 1.(4-pin)
IO Panel 2 x Antenna Ports
1 x PS/2 Mouse/Keyboard Port
1 x Optical SPDIF Out Port
1 x USB 3.1 Type-A Port (10 Gb/s)
1 x USB 3.1 Type-C Port (10 Gb/s)
8 x USB 3.0 Ports
4 x USB 3.0 Ports
3 x RJ-45 LAN Ports w/ LED
1 x BIOS Flashback Switch
HD Audio Jacks
The X399 Chipset ASRock X399 Taichi
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  • Holliday75 - Friday, September 15, 2017 - link

    Where is this magical land?
  • ddriver - Friday, September 15, 2017 - link

    Actually, many people in the developed world call a technician for even trivial things like changing a fuse. Building a computer, as simple as it is, is out of this world achievement in their eyes.
  • mapesdhs - Tuesday, September 19, 2017 - link

    Weird, normally such a person wouldn't even ask a relevant question. My gf doesn't care what my HTPC has inside, as long as it runs YT and plays DVDs, etc. ok, and she can use the wifi link to find stuff for her Kindle.
  • mapesdhs - Tuesday, September 19, 2017 - link

    NB: I was replying to ddriver saying, "So a dumb wife having to approve your purchases is a realistic scenario? :D".
  • Vatharian - Friday, September 15, 2017 - link

    No anything that has more than 2 HDDs is a server. I also have gaming PC that has 10 HDDs. They are low capacity, and connected to low-end HBA, but this way I won't ever lose any data. And I just can't think of a reason to pay well over $1000 for 10 disk-capable NAS.
  • ddriver - Friday, September 15, 2017 - link

    You really must love noise then, and waste power. Besides, the more drives, the more drives, the higher the odds some of them die. You can get a couple of large HGST drives, huge capacity, excellent reliability. The odds of both drives failing is minuscule, and would require the entire system burning up, which would be just as devastating regardless of many drives you have. You don't require 10 drives for the sake of the number. 10 TB HGST HE10 are like 350$.

    Besides, TR doesn't fall neither in the "budget", nor in the "gaming" category. That's a workstation CPU, and it actually does pretty bad in gaming, considering its price. Paying that much money for a product you are not gonna use for the job it is best at and complaining the mobo doesn't fit your senseless and wrong usage scenario - that's kinda dumb.

    It is a new high end product, you are gonna put new high end components in it, not 10 poor old tiny HDDs.
  • Guwapo77 - Saturday, September 16, 2017 - link

    It's not bad at gaming, however, it is not wise to use this solely for gaming. A workstation that you can use to handling your day to day workload that just happens to be fairly decent for gaming when you have time.

    Anyone building a gaming rig that chooses to buy a TR fails at life.
  • cyberguyz - Thursday, December 28, 2017 - link

    It has 2x M.2 slots not 3x. You need an add-in card to get the 3rd with this one
  • fazalmajid - Sunday, September 17, 2017 - link

    Annoying, but a LSI add-in HBA will generally outperform integrated SATA by a wide margin.
  • karatekid430 - Thursday, October 26, 2017 - link

    Ask the manufacturers to make M.2 PCIe cards with a SATA controller and a heap of SATA ports on board. I want them to provide these, and exclude SATA from motherboards, to save space and reduce complexity and cost. That way, the motherboards are cleaner for people who only require NVMe, and allow for people who need SATA to sacrifice M.2 slots for SATA.

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