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ASRock have used a rather fetching red and black colour scheme for the Fatal1ty 990FX Professional which gives it a similar visage to the Crosshair V Formula from Asus. This consists of a black PCB with an assortment of red and black fittings.
As it's name suggests, the Fatal1ty 990FX Professional features AMD's latest 990FX chipset which is very similar to the previous generation 890FX chipset. It does include a few extra features, though, with the most important being support for AMD's upcoming Bulldozer (Zambezi) processors.
In the centre of the motherboard we find the AM3+ socket which can be easily distinguished from the earlier AM3 socket as it is black in colour rather than white. Along one edge of the CPU socket there is a substantial heatsink that cools the V12 +2 CPU power phase circuitry. Power is supplied to the CPU via the 8-pin socket at the top of the board.
To the right of the right of the CPU socket we find four DDR3 RAM slots which support up to 32 GB of memory running at speeds of up to 2100 MHz, when overclocked. The 24-pin motherboard power connector is located in the usual place to the right of the memory slots alongside two USB3.0 front panel connectors. These allow you to connect up to four USB3.0 on the front panel.
ASRock have all the bases covered with the selection of expansion slots. There are three PCI Express x16 in total, the top two of which are spaced so that you can install two 3-bay graphics cards. The third will only run at x4 speed when the other two slots are populated. They have also included two PCI Express x1 slots and two legacy PCI slots.
There are six SATA 6Gbps connectors located in the bottom right hand corner of the motherboard, accompanied by power and reset buttons and a debug LED. Along the bottom edge of the board we find three front panel USB2.0 headers, a front panel IEEE-1394 connector and a front panel audio connector.
From left to right we find two PS2 connectors, analogue and digital S/PDIF jacks, six USB2.0 ports, two eSATA ports, two RJ-45 Ethernet jacks, two USB3.0 ports and six 2.5mm audio connections.
