ASRock Fatal1ty 990FX Professional

ASRock Fatal1ty 990FX Professional review

You can understand when Fatal1ty endorses a 1337 gaming mouse, but when a motherboard is emblazoned with the fatal one's name and face, it sends a slightly more confusing message. Is it a no-compromise AMD 990FX-based board capable of outperforming any other with raw performance and features? Or is it a stripped down racing car of a board, equipped with only the features you need? A quick glance over the ASRock Fatal1ty 990FX Professional's spec sheet reveals it's definitely the former.The board's well endowed with gold capacitors and special mouse ports, but it's the software that impresses us most. F-Stream is a slick all-in-one program that enables you to fiddle with overclocking, energy levels and fan settings from the desktop. The UEFI Bios is similarly comprehensive, although rendered slightly unnerving by featuring Mr Wendel's face in blood red as a background.Things get slightly silly when you start looking into the I/O though. One of the USB 2.0 ports is the Fatal1ty mouse port. Once a mouse is plugged in here, you can alter the polling rate from 100 to 500MHz with the F-Stream tuning software. It's no less than we'd expect from a Fatal1ty-endorsed motherboard, but since we're not quite at pro gamer levels, it's difficult to see how much of a difference this actually makes.