ASRock Fatal1ty Z77 Professional Review - IDE and Floppy on Z77

The effect of 'Fatal1ty' on a motherboard gives ASRock few marketing tools and several, perhaps beneficial, features for users.  Our mate Wendel is not only selling his brand, but also a consultant for design on the products – as a result, we get features such as IDE ports, Floppy Ports, improved mouse sensitivity ports, and a push to be more gamer friendly.  While most people can list features, it is left to ASRock on the motherboards to provide the implementation, which users hope will be top notch. 

Given the Z77 space, and the willingness of other manufacturers to introduce mild overclocking enhancements at default, the Z77 Professional as shipped does not perform perhaps as well as it should when it comes to computation or throughput – and is mildly disappointing when it also doesn’t reach the upper echelons in our gaming suite either due to this fact.

For I/O, the USB 2.0 speeds on ASRock boards seem to be a distinct margin slower than other products, but USB 3.0 is very normal.  ASRock rely on their XFast USB software, which applies new protocols to the USB drivers, to power through any USB test with ease and better-than-standard results. 

The main selling point for ASRock on the Fatal1ty Z77 Professional is the array of extra ‘gaming level’ features on board.  If the title of the review did not give it away, we have access to a Floppy port and an IDE port on board.  Legacy features such as these do not come around that often on modern level, ‘high end’ chipsets, so there will be a market here for them.  But I struggle to see the benefit to gamers – I once heard that the IDE port is so gamers can use old hard drives.  Given that it has been a good while since SATA took hold I would be surprised if anyone wanted to carry over an IDE drive in a Z77 build (even my father who updates every 6+ years is now fully on the SATA bandwagon).  The addition of the floppy drive confuses me as well.

Other gaming features I would expect on the board, such as improved audio, goes only as far as the Realtek ALC898, and the improved USB polling functionality would be limited by VSync (unless Virtu MVP + Virtual VSync is used).  Certain gamers prefer a PS/2 keyboard, so at least that is here.  Software wise we have the XFast LAN to prioritize gaming applications, as well as XFast RAM to provide quick swap file storage.

There are some other nice features on the board – 10 SATA ports being the main obvious one, but also dual Broadcom NICs which can be teamed for improved network throughput.  ASRock continue with their ‘Combined Cooler Option’, allowing both socket 775 and socket 1155 coolers to be used.

The final point to mention is the phase count.  While not really ever an issue on modern power delivery systems, it has been my observation over the past year that more phases means more power usage under lightly loaded scenarios due to multiple phase loading (depending on how they are multiplexed).  In that regard, the 16+8 phase solution on the Z77 Professional storms our power usage test during 1080p HD video in at 150W, 48W more than the Z77 Extreme4 (note almost 90%+ efficiency from power supply here).

Overall, the board has some features I would love to see elsewhere – SATA ports and Combined Cooler Option are preferred.  But the Z77 Professional lacks a lot of what differentiates a good board from a great gaming board – performance, intelligent layout and true gaming audio.  If ASRock want to promote a board with legacy components, it may be more beneficial to have a legacy SKU rather than pile on the features on a gaming class system.