ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion Motherboard Review

1. Introduction2. ASRock X79 Champion: Packaging and Bundle3. ASRock X79 Champion: Layout and Features4. ASRock X79 Champion: BIOS and Overclocking5. Testing Methodology6. Synthetic: 3DMark 117. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage8. Synthetic: PCMark 79. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven10. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra 201211. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.512. Synthetic: Super Pi13. Synthetic: CrystalDiskMark14. Real World: Media Encoding15. Synthetic: MKV Playback16. Synthetic: Blu-Ray Playback17. Gaming: Battlefield 318. Gaming: Max Payne 319. Technical: Power Consumption20. Closing Thoughts21. View All Pages

Today we are looking at the ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion – hot on the heels of our analysis of the X79 Extreme11.  The Fatal1ty X79 Champion seems to be somewhat of a bargain when compared to the £500 X79 Extreme11 … as it only costs £330.  This puts it up against Asus top-of-the range Rampage IV Extreme motherboard which is also designed with serious overclockers in mind.

We are going to test the motherboard with an Intel Core i7-3930K processor both at stock settings and when overclocked.

Features

ASRock supply the Fatal1ty X79 Champion in a large motherboard box which features a very similar red and black Fatal1ty livery, and a picture of Fatal1ty himself.

The front of the box acts as a door which opens to reveal a large plastic window.  Through this we can see the motherboard in all its glory.

Turning the box over reveals a detailed breakdown of the features and specification of the motherboard alongside a few product images and logos.

Inside the box there is a comprehensive bundle included.

This includes:

• 2 x ASRock SLI_Bridge Cards
• 1 x ASRock SLI_Bridge_3S Card
• 1 x ASRock 3-Way SLI Bridge Card
• 1 x ASRock 3-Way SLI-2S2S Bridge Card
• Quick Installation Guide, Support CD, I/O Shield
• 6 x SATA Data Cables
• 2 x SATA 1 to 1 Power Cables
• 1 x Front USB 3.0 Panel
• 4 x HDD Screws
• 6 x Chassis Screws

ASRock has chosen to use a black and red colour scheme for the Fatal1ty X79 Champion which consists of a black PCB and a combination of red and black fittings.  This is very similar to the colour scheme of the Asus Rampage IV Extreme motherboard.

Like the ASRock X79 Extreme11, the Fatal1ty X79 Champion also utilises the CEB form factor which should fit in most standard ATX cases providing they have a fair amount of room to the right of the motherboard stand-offs.

There is a large array of heatsinks surrounding the CPU socket to cool the power regulation circuitry which are all connected together with a series of heatpipes.  These are an obvious indicator that this board is designed for serious overclocking.

There is a single 8-pin power connectos above the heatsink to supply power to the CPU.

We find four RAM slots on either side of the CPU socket which support DDR3 2500+(OC)/2133(OC)/1866(OC)/1600/1333/1066 non-ECC, un-buffered memory in a quad channel configuration.

On the right hand side of the motherboard we find the 24-pin power connector alongside two internal USB3.0 headers.

We also find a series of pins above the 24-pin power connector which let you hook up a volt meter to measure various voltages directly rather than relying on system readouts.

Moving further down the right hand side of the board we find an array of ten SATA connectors.  There are two SATA-600 connectors and four SATA-300 connectors hooked up to the X79 chipset which support RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 10 and Intel Rapid Storage 3.0, NCQ, AHCI and “Hot Plug” functions.

There are four further SATA-600 connectors which are connected to a Marvell SE9230 and support RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 10, NCQ, AHCI and “Hot Plug” functions.

There are seven expansion slots in total which will fulfill the needs of the vast majority of users.  There are five PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots which are capable of running the following configurations: PCIE1/PCIE5: x16/16 mode; PCIE1/PCIE3/PCIE5: x16/8/8 mode; PCIE1/PCIE4/PCIE7: x16/8/8 mode; PCIE1/PCIE3/PCIE5/PCIE7: x16/8/8/8 mode.  The motherboard supports up to 4-way CrossfireX and 4-way SLI. There are also two PCI Express 2.0 x1 slots on the motherboard.

Along the bottom edge of the motherboard there is a 4-pin molex connector which can be used to supply extra power to the expansion lanes.  This will help when running an array of powerful graphics cards which may not have their power requirements fulfilled by the motherboard.

We also find a full complement of internal headers along the bottom edge of the motherboard.  From left to right we find a HD audio connector, a S/PDIF header (for HDMI), an IR header, a COM header, three USB2.0 headers, the front panel header and a Firewire header.

There are also two fan headers and power and reset buttons along the bottom edge.

The rear I/O panel supports:

• 1 x PS/2 Keyboard Port
• 1 x Optical SPDIF Out Port
• 1 x Ready-to-Use USB 2.0 Port
• 1 x Fatal1ty Mouse Port (USB 2.0)
• 2 x eSATA3 Connectors
• 8 x Ready-to-Use USB 3.0 Ports
• 2 x RJ-45 LAN Ports with LED (ACT/LINK LED and SPEED LED)
• 1 x IEEE 1394 Port
• 1 x Clear CMOS Switch with LED
• HD Audio Jack: Rear Speaker / Central / Bass / Line in / Front Speaker / Microphone

ASRock have used their comprehensive UEFI interface for this motherboard which has been decorated in an attractive red and black Fatal1ty style.

After pressing the DEL button to enter the BIOS we are greeted by the main screen which displays some basic information about the system.

Most of the important settings for us are located on the OC Tweaker page.  There are plenty of settings which will let you spend hours tweaking every ounce of performance from your system.  We also find ASRock’s extremely useful automatic overclocking feature on this page.

On the next page we find all of the non-overclocking settings under various different tabs.

The H/W Monitor page there is a list of temperatures readouts, fan speeds and voltages from the system.

The next two pages contain the boot and security settings and the last lets us exit the BIOS.

Overclocking

We decided to try out the ASRock automatic overclocking feature which let us overclock the system to a number of pre-defined frequencies.  We decided to use the 4.8 GHz setting for our tests which uses a baseclock of 100 MHz and a multiplier of 48x.  This required a core voltage of 1.46V.  We wouldn't feel comfortable pushing the motherboard further than this with prolonged use because the temperatures were getting a little toasty.

For some reason, we couldn't get this speed to validate properly on CPU-Z as every time we validated it seemed to over write the previous validation.  So we have a screenshot of the validation but not a link.

The maximum overclock we were able to achieve was 5.1 GHz using a baseclock of 100 MHz and a multiplier of 51x.  This required a core voltage of 1.48V.

See validation here.

In this review we are going to benchmark the i7-3930K at reference clock speeds and when overclocked to 4.8 GHz. We used the excellent Corsair H100 cooler for our tests as it's one of the best coolers available on the market.

Test System:

Processor: Intel Core i7-3930K
Motherboard: ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion
Cooler: Corsair H100
Case: Silverstone Temjin TJ04E
Thermal Paste: Arctic Cooling MX-2
Memory: 16 GB Mushkin Redline 2133 MHz.
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 7950
Power Supply: Corsair HX 850W
System Drive: Crucial M4 256 GB
Monitor: Viewsonic VX2260WM
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)

Software:

PCMark 7
3DMark 11
SiSoft Sandra 2012 SP3
Cinebench R11.5
CrystalDiskMark
Cyberlink MediaEspresso 6.5
VLC Media Player
Performance Monitor
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
Super Pi 1.5 Mod
CPUID Hardware Monitor
CPU-Z
DiRT 3
Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City

3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista. The benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.

Here we see a significant boost in performance when the system was overclocked, especially when we consider the physics score.

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.

Again, we see a strong improvement in performance when the system is overclocked.

PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows 7 for home and business use.

Here we can see that there is a substantial boost in system wide performance when the system is overclocked.

Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand.

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk.

Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:

• Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
• Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
• Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
• Multicore CPU support
• Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
• Powerful C++ API
• Comprehensive performance profiling system
• Flexible XML-based data structures

There is a small, yet noticeable boost in framerate with this test when the system is overclocked.

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software. Sandra is a (girl) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)
• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)
• Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)
• Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)
• Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

• SMP – Multi-Processor
• MC – Multi-Core
• SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading
• MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions
• GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics
• NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access
• AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86
• IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

An excellent set of results for the system in this test.

Cinebench R11.5 is the newest revision of the popular benchmark from Maxon. The test scenario uses all of your system’s processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene (from the viral “No Keyframes” animation by AixSponza). This scene makes use of various different algorithms to stress all available processor cores.

In fact, CINEBENCH can measure systems with up to 64 processor threads. The test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects containing more than 300,000 total polygons and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights and shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. The result is given in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor.

Here we can see the benefits of having six cores available with hyperthreading as there is better than six times scaling between the single and multithreaded tests.

Super Pi is used by a huge audience, particularly to check stability when overclocking processors. If a system is able to calculate PI to the 2 millionth pace after the decimal without mistake, it is considered to be stable in regards to RAM and CPU.

This test shows how capable the system is in a single threaded application.

CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0 x64.  For our tests we are using a Kingston HyperX 3K 120 GB solid state drive.

Here we can see the benefits of connecting our SSD to one of the SATA-600 connectors. No performance concerns.

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6.5 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats.

Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology.

New and Improved Features

• Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously.
• Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention.
• Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices.
• Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment.
• Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A.
• Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier.

For our testing today we are converting a 1.09GB 720p MKV file (44mins) to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device. This is a common procedure for many people and will give a good indication of system power. We are using the newest version of this program with full hardware acceleration enabled.

In this test we can see how overclocking can benefit you in the real world.

Many people who have media systems will be familiar with the Matroska (.mkv) file format which is often used for high definition video. In this test we will be using VLC Media Player to play a 1080P MKV file while recording CPU usage using Performance Monitor.

Here we see a slight reduction in the CPU usage when the system is overclocked.

Cyberlink PowerDVD 12 is one of the finest solutions for the BluRay experience on Windows and we found this software to work perfectly with this chipset. We tested with the  Blu-Ray Disc of Independence Day.

The system hardly breaks a sweat in this test, leaving plenty of clock cycles for other programs.

According to EA, Battlefield 3 garnered 3 million pre-orders by the day of its release. It is unknown at present whether these figures are worldwide or just for the US. The pre-order total makes it “the biggest first-person shooter launch in EA history”, according to the publisher. The engine is beautiful on the PC and very demanding of the partnering hardware.

As you can see, overclocking the system achieves a small boost in framerate.

Max Payne 3 is a third-person shooter in which the player assumes the role of its titular character, Max Payne. Max Payne 3features a similar over-the-shoulder camera as its predecessors, with the addition of a cover mechanic, while also retaining much of the same run-and-gun style of gameplay.Max Payne 3 also marks the return of bullet-time in action sequences, for which the franchise is notable. In bullet-time it is possible to see every bullet strike an enemy in detail. New to the series is a “Last Stand” mechanic, which gives the player a grace period after losing all health during which time the player may kill the enemy that wounded them in order to continue playing, however this mechanic is only usable if the player has one or more bottles of painkillers in their possession.

This game is very demanding and is limited by the graphics power of our test system.

We measured the power consumption of our entire test system at the wall while loading the CPU using Prime95 and GPU using FurMark. We recorded results with the system at reference clock speeds and when overclocked to 4.7 GHz.

Some rather high numbers in the power consumption test but this is to be expected from a X79 system, especially when overclocked to these limits.

Everything considered we are left with very positive impressions of the ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion.  It's clear that ASRock are targeting this particular motherboard at enthusiasts who demand extremely high, yet stable overclocked settings.

We managed to achieve a very impressive 4.8 GHz overclock with the automatic overclocking feature which was completely stable.  This is as far as we'd want to push the i7-3930K chip in this system for prolonged use as the temperatures were quite toasty under full load … around 90 degrees C with the excellent Corsair H100.

The automatic overclocking feature is ideal for those who don't have the time or expertise to overclock the system manually.  As you can see from our tests, it yields significant real world performance improvements.

If you have the means to invest in a custom water cooling loop for the CPU we expect that you could easily push the overclock further with this motherboard as it had no issues at all reaching 4.8 GHz with the Corsair H100.

The Fatal1ty X79 Champion boasts a very impressive feature set which includes six SATA-600 ports and a generous selection of PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots which can be used in various graphics configurations.

They aren't quite as flexible as the expansion configurations on the ASRock X79 Extreme11 which would be a better option if you're looking to use more than two graphics cards in your system. The X79 Fatalt1ty Champion can only run two graphics cards at x16 speeds.

As we mentioned in the introduction to this review, the ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion is significantly cheaper than the ASRock X79 Extreme11 and can be yours for £330 from Overclockers UK. For the vast majority of enthusiast user the X79 Extreme11 wouldn't be worth the £150 price premium.

The price of the Fatal1ty X79 Champion puts it head to head with the Asus Rampage IV Extreme motherboard.  We don't think there's much at all to choose between these two motherboards which is a real testament to the progress that ASRock have made in the last couple of years.

Pros

• Excellent automatic OC feature.
• Attractive red and black colour scheme.
• Form factor will fit in most ATX cases.
• Comprehensive UEFI.
• Priced in line with competition.

Cons

• Still expensive.

KitGuru says: An excellent alternative to the Asus Rampage IV Extreme.

Become a Patron!