Exclusive: ASRock X99 Professional Preview; X99 OC Formula Shared, Too
ASRock's X99 Professional and X99 OC Formula both have 1300 W CPU support for extreme overclocking with liquid nitrogen.
In the last X99 motherboard reveal from ASRock, the company teased support for 1300 W processors. Today, ASRock shared images with us of the X99 OC Formula and gave us an exclusive peek at the X99 Professional. These two boards are ASRock’s overclocking-oriented boards, and while they are largely identical, they do have subtle and not-so-subtle differences. Both of these motherboards have a 12-phase VRM circuit, which can supply up to 1300 W of power to the CPU.
Both boards carry the LGA2011-3 socket, along with eight DDR4 memory slots for quad-channel memory and five PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots (up to four of which can be used to install dual-slot graphics cards). They both have ten SATA3 (6 Gb/s) ports and not one, but two M.2 slots. One of the M.2 slots is an Ultra M.2 slot that sports four PCI-Express 3.0 lanes, while the other is a port that runs off of four PCI-Express 2.0 lanes.
It's worth noting that this is the first time we’ve seen a board with two M.2 slots.
We already know that both motherboards come with extensive overclocking support, so the question is why has ASRock built two almost-identical boards. The reasoning is quite simple: The X99 OC Formula is built to be the ultimate overclockers board, while the X99 Professional is targeted at a gaming-oriented audience. The things that set them apart, aside from the not-so-subtle color difference, are the additional heatsink we find on the X99 OC Formula and the Killer E2200 networking adapter and Fatal1ty mouse ports on the X99 Professional board. Given the similarities between these boards, it wouldn’t surprise us if some folks would decide between the two simply based on availability, or the color scheme.
For rear I/O both of the boards are identical, with two USB 2.0 ports, six USB 3.0 ports, a single legacy PS/2 port, dual Gigabit Ethernet and 8-channel HD audio which is driven by ASRock’s Purity Sound 2 chip.
No word on pricing or availability yet, though we do expect most X99 motherboards to arrive August 29, which is also when we expect DDR4 and the Haswell-E processors to start shipping.
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Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.