Connectors and I/O

Totally ASRock equipped the Fatal1ty X79 Champion with ten angled SATA ports, which is enough for every office PC, gaming rig or overclocking setup. Six of them are SATA 3.0 (two via the Intel X79 and four other via a Marvell 88SE9230 controller) coloured in red while the four last ones are coloured in black and are SATA 2.0 (via Intel X79). We told you, red is faster, always! 
Furthermore there are practical onboard power-, reset-buttons as well as a debug LED. The BIOS can be cleared via a jumper, by removing the battery or simply by pushing the clr_CMOS button located in the back panel. Common to multi-GPU boards these days you also find a Molex plug at the bottom of the board to provide more power and better cable management thanks to his 90° angulation. ASRock also added some OC features to their top range motherboard like the voltage measuring points you find at the top right of the PCB just above the ATX12V connector.
As for the PCIe connectors with this motherboard you get five PCIe 16x Gen 3.0 (in red, again!) and two PCIe 1x (in black). From top to bottom for the PCIe 16x you have: 16 lanes, 8 lanes, 8 lanes, 16 lanes and 8 lanes. Please check the specifications page to see what you can do with them.


Totally you'll find six fan headers on the ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion which is more than enough to provide even an overclocking rig or even a high-end gaming machine with plenty of fresh air. Bellow the locations of the fan headers, only two of them are PWM (CHA_FAN1 and CPU_FAN1).
Looking at the external connectors directly at the back-panel ASRock equipped the Fatal1ty X79 Champion with one PS2 mouse/keyboard connector, eight USB 3.0/2.0 ports (provided by two Texas Instruments TUSB7340 controllers), a Fatal1ty Mouse Port (USB 2.0) along with  a standard USB 2.0 and two LAN gigabit ethernet ports (provided using two Broadcom BCM57781). Furthermore there is a CLR CMOS button, a firewire port and two eSATA 6 Gbps ports (Marvell 88SE9172 controller).
The audio is provided by a chip from Creative named CA0132 better know as Recon3Di HD. The one you also find on Creative's Recon3D Fatal1ty soundcard. This way you will have better audio quality than with a common Realtek audio chip. The audio out consists of an analogic panel (5 Jacks) and an optical connector.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 9 - SiSoft Sandra 1
Page 2 - Specs and Delivery	Page 10 - SiSoft Sandra 2
Page 3 - Layout	Page 11 - Super Pi 1M / 32M / wPrime
Page 4 - Connectors and I/O	Page 12 - Games
Page 5 - BIOS	Page 13 - Power Consumption
Page 6 - Test setup	Page 14 - Performance Rating
Page 7 - 3D Mark 11	Page 15 - Conclusion
Page 8 - PC Mark 7

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