ASRock Fatal1ty 990FX Professional Motherboard Review

ASRock include a number of applications on the motherboard CD including trials of PowerDVD, MediaEspresso and Norton Internet Security.  What we're really interested in is the ASRock specific software that is included.

The most interesting and most useful inclusion is ASRock's F-Stream Tuning Utility which lets you monitor various aspects of the system hardware including temperatures, fan speeds, clocks and voltages.  It also lets us adjust the settings for these through the buttons on the left for fan control and overclocking.  There is also an option called Fatal1ty Mouse Port which lets you adjust the polling rate of the USB port to match the mouse, ensuring the best possible performance for gamers.  There is also an ‘Energy Saving' option which is designed to reduce the power consumption of your system.

There are a few other pieces of software on the CD that are ASRock specific, including ‘XFast USB' which boosts USB transfer rates.  ‘XFast LAN' lets us improve the latencies in game by prioritising certain applications.  You are also able to view the data transferring in real time.  There is also an application included which lets you use 3TB hard drives with 32-bit operating systems – you would usually be limited to a maximum of 2TB.

ASRock have chosen to use a UEFI BIOS for the Fatal1ty 990FX Professional which is not dissimilar from that that Asus include with all their latest motherboards.  It doesn't provide the same one button overclocking options but there is an Automatic OC function which provides settings for various different levels of overclocking.  Other than this, there aren't really any out-of-the-ordinary features to speak of.

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