 Welcome to an unboxing that many of you have requested. This is the ASRock Fatality Professional Series Z77 motherboard. So this is an LGA1155 board using the Z77 chipset, which means you got support for all the latest features, including third generation Intel Core processors, NVIDIA SLI, ATI, AMD Crossfire X technology, Windows 7, which is sort of not really the latest, as well as a bunch of other stuff. So they've got 555, which I guess is better than Gigabytes 333. Maybe that's what they were going for here. So 5x LAN speed, 5x USB speed, and 5x system speed with XFast RAM, XFast USB, and XFast LAN. Okay, so you can Photoshop apparently up to 5x faster. XFast RAM will create... Oh, that's cool. No, no, this might actually be cool. Okay, so XFast RAM will create a virtual disk from the system memory to boost the performance for Photoshop. It can even perform 5x faster than before. Neat. Lower latency in games with ASRock's motherboard with XFast LAN versus other motherboard without it. And USB comparison, 5x faster, although they don't really say why. Power by Fnet. Okay. High performance. This is a feature of Lucid Virtue MVP, which is an updated version of Virtue allowing switchable graphics so you can get the best of your dedicated graphics card and your onboard graphics card as well as virtual v-sync, which, I don't know, I tried. It felt like there was more input lag, so I didn't really like it that much. And high performance, which adds performance to some games using the onboard VGA on your CPU. Smart Connect technology, Rapid Start technology turn on really fast as well as a bunch of other cool stuff. Premium gold caps. Yes, they are gold plated. Very cool. Digital power design. 16 plus 8 power phase design. Total of 4 DIMMs at up to 2800 MHz plus. And the Fatality mouse port is pretty cool because what it allows you to do is automatically customize the polling rate and other features of the mouse port to be the same as what Jonathan Fatality Wendell uses. You can play Quake. No, but seriously. I've seen him play. He's much, much better than me. I don't mean to be ragging on the guy. It's just that I think you should, for things like mouse settings, I think you should find what works for you. That's all. I don't think that necessarily using the same polling rate on your USB port is going to dramatically improve your gameplay. However, that doesn't take away from the fact that this looks like an absolutely beastly motherboard with a very, very complete accessory package by the look of things. Let us continue moving on with the Fatality Professional Z77. So first you got your quick installation guide, which ironically is about 8 meters thick. You've also got a utility DVD. Download the latest from the ASRock website. Six SATA cables, an I.O. shield that is handily color coordinated. And apparently there's a lot of different outputs on this motherboard, so we're going to check that out. Two Molex to SATA adapters. They're super handy. Even if you don't use them for this build, you might run into a use for them sometime in the future. We've also got... Oh, okay. That's just a hard SLI bridge. We've also got a front USB 3, 3.5 inch to internal header. This is super handy. It's great that it comes with it. And you can even unscrew it from the 3.5 inch bay piece and put it onto an I.O. shield and use it for the back of your case if you already have front USB 3. So that's really, really neat. A couple of more guides as well as a software setup guide. And now let's have a look at the board itself. So it's got a very unique look. It'll go really well with your Fatality 1000 watt power supply. Where is that? Oh, you know what? We actually did an episode on the NCIX com channel not that long ago about color coordinating your build where we had an Asus Crosshair 5 formula and the Fatality power supply. We had Radeon 7970 graphics cards, red LED lighting. It looked absolutely amazing. So a board like this on the Intel side would go great with a build like that. So here we go. We got our gold plated capacitors. We've got our LG 1155 CPU socket. Remember, this is compatible with second gen Sandy Bridge or third gen Ivy Bridge Intel core processors. These memory slots, as I mentioned before, support up to DDR3 2800 megahertz. Look at that, an IDE port. When's the last time you saw an IDE port? I mean, ASRock has really gone all out to include everything. I mean, maybe Jonathan has like an IDE optical drive that he really likes. I do. I have one of those BenQ ones that was like the epitome of optical drives and it's IDE. I haven't had a board I can use it on in ages. So there you go. Maybe he has one too. So we've got an 8-pin power connector in the top of the board in its ideal location. 24-pin power connector along the right-hand edge of the board in its similarly ideal location. Front USB 3.0 port. 6 SATA3 6 gigabit per second ports with 4 SATA3, SATA2 3 gigabit per second ports. And for better performance, we suggest port 0 to 5 is boot devices. So that's these ones. Remember, port 0 to 5 is 1 to 6 in sort of real people terms. So these are the ones running off the Intel controller. These guys are running off of what is evidently an ASMedia controller. All right. Onboard power buttons, also fatality themed. Power and reset. Power post debugging LED. We've also got front USB 2.0. Front fire wire. Our front panel connectors which are helpfully labeled. We've got really a floppy connector. Can you install Quake off a floppy drive? I'm not actually sure. It's a pretty old game. Check this out though. We've got a PLX bridge on here. So you should be able to see some pretty intelligent switching of the PCI Express lanes. It's really tricky. The more stuff you build in to these Z77 boards, whether it's third party chipsets for SATA, whether it's more USB 3, whether it's additional PCI Express slots, the trickier it gets for the onboard CPU PCI Express controller to manage it. So the PLX chip, I'm not sure what it's working on over there, but it's probably just allowing it to get the best performance possible. These chips aren't cheap, so there you go. It's on the board. In terms of PCI Express slots, we've got two PCIe 1x, two PCI, and three PCIe 16x. Although please note, this one's only wired for 4x and is only really going to be fully functional and basically I wouldn't put anything too demanding in it like a graphics card unless you're running an Ivy Bridge CPU and even then it's not going to be ideal. For all intents and purposes, this is a two-way SLI and two-way Crossfire compatible board. That is two cards. It's still around quad SLI and quad Crossfire with dual GPU cards. This one is only at 8x, but remember this is 8x PCIe 3.0, so that means you've got the same bandwidth as PCIe 2.0 16x, so you're going to get full performance out of two cards going here. Front audio is over here in its ideal location and you've got a... You know what? Let's have a look at the cooling solution that we've got going on here and get some close-ups of that. It looks pretty good. Jonathan signed it over here. Got some more beefy aluminum heat sinks going on over here. He wants me to keep turning it, I think. I don't know what you're talking about. Fans. Oh, fans. Good thinking. Apparently, this means fans according to SLI, which is sort of abstract, but whatever. So we've got one, two, two four-pin PWM fan headers and then one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Three pin. No, four three-pin fan headers. So mostly done by three pin, two PWM. Personally, to me, it doesn't make much of a difference. I very rarely plug fans into my motherboard anyway because I usually use a real fan controller, but there you go. Now you know. Yeah, that's right. Okay, good job. Thanks, SLI. On the back, you find not really much of note other than a backplate and then... Oh, and some via chip. Cool. Now let's have a look at what we've got in terms of I.O. We have lots of different I.O. So we have six USB 3.0 ports. Speaking of adding extra things, you know, like more USB 3, we've also got a PS2 keyboard-mouse combo port. These are huge. If you have a high-end keyboard that only runs on PS2 and a lot of the mechanical ones do, you're going to make sure to get one of these PS2 ports. HDMI and DisplayPort out. Cover your digital display out options. Remember, if you want to run the onboard graphics in addition to your dedicated graphics card in order to take advantage of QuickSync, which allows you to quickly encode video or transcode video, you will want to run off of one of these or over here you just have to make sure the software is connected correctly. Six USB 2.0 ports. eSATA, Firewire, Dual Gigabit LAN, Optical Audio Out, as well as 5.1 audio or 7.1, rather, audio out via analog. I think I never mentioned the front USB 3 header that's running off the Intel chipset. And this is, like I said, one of the more complete boards I've seen in a very long time. I mean, even to the point where it's got floppy and IDE connectors on it. Very cool. So you can connect a grand total of like two drives here, ten drives here, and like a floppy drive. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.