We've been deluged with X99 motherboard teases, and now we can add ASRock's upcoming X99X Killer mainboard to the list. At first blush, this motherboard appears to follow a fairly standard X99 recipe, although there are several small details that set the X99 Killer apart from the crowd (in a good way).
Let's start with the basics, though: In the center we find the LGA2011-3 socket, which is flanked by eight DDR4 memory slots for quad-channel memory. For PCI-Express expansion, there are three PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots along with two PCI-Express 1x slots. The motherboard also comes with 10 SATA3 (6 Gb/s) ports, and ASRock has omitted SATA-Express connectivity.
We can't really be mad about the missing SATA-Express connectivity, though, because the board does have an Ultra M.2 port. The M.2 port is driven by four PCI-Express 3.0 lanes as opposed to the two PCI-Express 2.0 lanes we see on most boards. In short, this gives the port a staggering 32 Gb/s. We've seen this implementation before in our review of ASRock's Z97 Exteme 6 motherboard.
We also find two USB 3.0 headers, a single internal USB 2.0 port and dedicated audio in the form of Purity Sound 2. On the rear I/O panel there is a single PS/2 port, two Fatal1ty USB 2.0 ports for gaming peripherals, six USB 3.0 ports, an eSATA port, Intel Gigabit Ethernet, another Gigabit Ethernet port powered off the Killer E2200 NIC, and the 8-channel HD audio, along with an optical Toslink output.
All things considered, these features point to the X99 Killer being a solid motherboard, but what sets this apart more than anything fastest-possible storage capabilities via the Ultra M.2 port.
There's no word on pricing or availability yet, but we expect this one to be available sometime around mid-September, when we expect the Haswell-E CPUs to arrive.
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