ASRock Fatal1ty 990FX Professional Motherboard Review

To test the Fatal1ty 990FX Professional motherboard we are going to use the AMD Phenom X6 1090T Black Edition CPU, combined with the Cooler Master Hyper 612S CPU Cooler.

Test System

Processor: AMD Phenom II X6 1090T
Motherboard: ASRock Fatal1ty 990FX Professional
Cooler: Cooler Master 612S
Memory: 4GB (2x 2GB) Kingston HyperX Genesis 1600MHz
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 6950
Power Supply: NZXT Hale90 750W
Optical Drive: Samsung B083L Blu-Ray Drive
Monitors: Viewsonic VX2260WM
Boot Drive: Intel 510 Series 250 GB

Software

Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)
FRAPS Professional
SiSoft Sandra 2011 SP3
CPUz
GPUz
CPUID Hardware Monitor
Cinebench R11.5 (64-bit)
Cyberlink PowerDVD 11 Ultra
Cyberlink MediaEspresso 6.5
CrystalDiskMark
3DMark 11
PCMark 7
VLC Media Player
Performance Monitor

Games

DiRT 3
F1 2010
Grand Theft Auto IV: Episodes from Liberty City
Dead Space 2

All the latest BIOS updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests across five closely matched runs and averages out the results to get an accurate median figure.

Overclocking

First of all we tried the automatic overclocking feature of the motherboard which was reasonably effective.  Using this feature we were able to achieve an overclock of 3.8 Ghz but we did have to bump the voltage the motherboard was supplying to the CPU from 1.4V to 1.4375V to ensure complete stability.  We managed to get the system to boot using the 4.0Ghz automatic overclock but this proved unstable, even with a bump in voltage to 1.45V.

Then we set about trying to achieve the maximum possible overclock with the system.  We had more success when overclocking the CPU using the multiplier rather than the baseclock – the automatic overclock feature only overclocks the baseclock.  While this means the memory isn't overclocked, we managed to achieve a much more impressive overclock of 4.2Ghz by raising the multiplier to 21x whilst retaining the baseclock at 200Mhz.  We set the CPU voltage to 1.475V for this test.

Next we upped the baseclock to 210 Mhz, leaving the CPU voltage at 1.475V, achieving a clockspeed of 4.3Ghz.  While our test system was stable at this speed, we were a little concerned about the CPU temperature at this clockspeed so we chose to peg the system back to 4.1Ghz for our benchmarks using a multiplier of 21x and a baseclock of 200Mhz.

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