You can now see the first pictures of this particular high-end workstation platform

Aug 13, 2014 08:28 GMT  ·  By

There seems to be a lot of movement on the high-end desktop workstation market, now that Intel is getting close to the launch of the next high-end, extreme-performance central processing units. ASRock is getting ready to contribute.

The Haswell-E brand is one that Intel has chosen for the segment of central processing units, which are better in all ways than even the best Core i7 chips from the consumer line.

The series will take the place of Ivy Bridge-E, just like Ivy Bridge-E replaced the Sandy Bridge-E series before it, not so many years ago.

It's a queer arrangement really. The Extreme-performance sector is serviced by a line of chips based on a processor architecture one generation behind the times.

Sure, the consumer market is still being serviced by the Haswell line, but Broadwell chips will come out soon enough, while Haswell-E will continue to rule the workstation segment. Just like Ivy Bridge-E sold alongside Haswell and Sandy Bridge-E shipped while Ivy Bridge powered Intel's consumer processors.

For motherboards to support Haswell-E processors, they will need the X99 chipset and the associated LGA 2011-3 socket.

Gigabyte X99-SOC Force is an example of such a motherboard. Apparently, ASRock is preparing something similar, called X99X Killer Fatal1ty.

The X99X Killer mainboard has ten SATA 6.0 Gbps ports, an Ultra M.2 connector (m.2 wired through PCI Express x4 tech, for 20 Gbps speed), and dual Gigabit Ethernet (through an Intel NIC and one Killer E2200 NIC).

7.1-channel Purity Sound 2 audio and eight USB 3.0 ports, plus an eSATA connector and debug LED, round up the “normal” features.

That leaves the overkill traits, specifically the three PCI Express x16 slots and eight DDR4 DIMM slots (up to 128 GB RAM can be installed). Then again, it's a surprise there aren't 4 PCI Express x16 3.0 slots. The other X99 motherboards we've seen have 4, but that's not the case here. Meaning that you can only make quad-SLI/Crossfire setups if you buy dual-GPU video cards.

ASRock will start shipping the X99X Killer Fatal1ty motherboard on August 29, for an unspecified price. We guess this means all other competing platforms will start selling on that day as well. The attached gallery has the first press shots released by the company to the public.

It seems like there's more red than black on them, which appears to be popular among all motherboard suppliers nowadays, at least when it comes to hardcore hardware. The red is brighter than we're used to though, so we can't say it's totally indistinguishable from the competition.

ASRock X99X Killer Fatal1ty (3 Images)

ASRock X99X Killer Fatal1ty
ASRock X99X Killer Fatal1tyASRock X99X Killer Fatal1ty
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