The Board - Layout

The ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion is a bit larger than the standard ATX format, by nearly a full inch in fact, something ASRock refers to as the CEB Form Factor. Wrapped in black around red with bits of gold everywhere, it sure does make an impression in person. The front is pretty busy, but the back of the board is very similar to other Intel X79-based products, with many VRM components found in various places.


The socket area is just as busy as the rest of the front, with cooling elements found both above and below the CPU socket. The back of the board is fairly similar on the upper edge, but I did not notice anything that might cause issues when installing the ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion into your chosen case.


Fitted with seven PCIe slots, the ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion supports five slots of PCIe 3.0 functionality, with two black PCIe x1 slots rounding out the ranks. There are a total of eight DIMM slots, each alternating in black and red, with a black slot closest to the socket in each quad-slot bank.


As is common to multi-GPU boards these days, I found a Molex plug along with the standard pin headers located on the bottom edge. It's nicely angled at 90 degrees from the board's surface which helps a lot with case cable management.


I found not one, but two USB 3.0 headers by the 24-pin connector - part of the reason there's a bay device found in the box. There are also many fan headers on the ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion, but only two of the six supplied are PWM-based - one for the CPU, as well as the CHA_FAN1 header on the bottom edge.


The rear I/O includes a keyboard PS/2 plug as well as a specialized USB 2.0 1000 Hz mouse port paired with a normal USB 2.0 port. There's also a Clear CMOS header near the left edge. You don't have to pull off the case side panel should you need to reset the CMOS during a late-night overclocking session. There's dual LAN, dual eSATA, FireWire, and no less than eight USB 3.0 ports too. The audio tower is fairly simple, with five analogue ports and one digital port. For internal SATA support, there's ten total ports, six SATA 6 Gb/s, and four SATA 3 Gb/s ports, each clearly labeled on the board's edge.