Product Showcase Motherboard

Product Showcase

The ASRock OC Formula follows an EATX form factor, that would be 12 in. x 10.4 in. (30.5 cm x 26.4 cm). The motherboard is the flagship product within the ASRock X99 range and costs roughly 325 EURO at the moment of writing this article.  

Included with the motherboard are the regulars including; manuals, driver CDs, SATA cables and a rear IO plate. 

• CPU support: Haswell-E class Intel Core processors
• 8x DIMM DDR4 slots - configurations are possible up to 128GB
• Chipset: Intel X99 Express Chipset
• 2x Gigabit Ethernet (One Intel / One Qualcom Atheros
• Intel 802.11a/b/g/n/ac, BT 4.0, Intel Wi-Di
• Storage: 10x SATA 6Gb/s, 2x M.2, PCIe (One Ultra M.2. Gen 3 x4 (32Gb/sec).
• Connectivity: 5x PCI-E 3.0 x16 
• 6x USB 3.0 / 8x USB 2.0 rear IO
• 8-channel Audio ALC1150 Realtek

Well look at that; small and good looking. And really, as powerful as an enthusiast setup. Included in the bundle is one mighty fine motherboard and gear like Protective IO cover, SATA cables, SLI connectors, manual driver CD etc.

You will notice that the ASRock OC Formula has an EMI shield on audio, you can argue whether or not these work, but they sure do look nice.  The I/O back panel reveals two USB 2.0 ports (black) with another six USB 3.0 ports (blue). A Realtek ALC1150 high definition audio codec is the source for audio. The audio unit has special capacitors and EMI shielding and also has an added Audio DAC, Nichicon caps etc. We spot two 10/100/1000 fast Ethernet jacks (Intel & Qualcom). There is a single PS/2 combo port that can be used for either a keyboard or a mouse, optical SPDIF in/out port and six audio jacks.  The motherboard is Pro overclockers targeted and thus suited for LN2 overclocking. In fact ASRock even applied a conformal coating (waterproof coating), now you might wonder what the purpose of such a coating is, but again that is a feature for hardcore overclockers. It stops condensing water on a motherboard when it gets so cold because the pro overclockers use liquid nitrogen to cool. Heck it won't dissuade with a liquid cooling leak either I guess :)

Check that, 5 x PCIe 3.0 x16 slots. a whopping five PCI-Express 3.0 x16 which can be arranged in these slot configurations with graphics cards:

 5 x PCIe 3.0 x16 slots (PCI_E1~E4, PCI_E6), support up to 4-way mode

• 1-way mode: x16/ x0/ x0/ x0/ x0
• 2-way mode: x16/ x0/ x0/ x16/ x0, x16/ x0/ x0/ x8/ x0
• 3-way mode: x16/ x0/ x0/ x16/ x8, x8/ x8/ x0/ x8/ x0
• 4-way mode: x8/ x8/ x0/ x16/ x8, x8/ x8/ x0/ x8/ x4

As you can see these are PCI Express Gen 3.0 configurations, that's just more than plenty. Mind you that the Core i7 5960X and 5930K processors have 40 PCIe Gen 3.0 lanes while the Core i7 5820K 'only' has 28 PCIe lanes.

So for multi-GPU Support these rules apply:

• Supports 4-Way AMD CrossFireTM Technology
• Supports 4-Way NVIDIA SLI Technology (For the CPU that supports 40 PCIe lanes)
• Supports 3-Way NVIDIA SLI Technology (For the CPU that supports 28 PCIe lanes)