Introduction

Just yesterday we had a look at the ASRock Z68 Extreme7 Gen3 and it did a good job of impressing us. Priced under the Z68 Extreme7 Gen3, we'll be today looking at the Fatal1ty Z68 Professional Gen3 to see what it can offer us.

It's the first time we've seen the Fatal1ty board get the Z68 treatment with the last one we looked at carrying with it the P67 chipset. What was a little unusual about that one was the fact that the Z68 chipset was out at the time. No doubt the P67 version had been in the works for a bit and that was probably the reason that at the time ASRock had decided to skip the Z68 chipset.

The Fatal1ty lines of boards have done a good job in the past impressing us with some good performance at a good price point. The question is, can the Fatal1ty Z68 Professional Gen3 do the same? Before we find out how the performance of the board goes, the first thing we need to do is get stuck into the package to see just what ASRock are offering.

Once we've checked out the package, we'll take a closer look at the board itself before looking at the BIOS side of things which I must say has had a really important change. We'll get into that more a little later, though. Once that's done we'll look at our testbed, the overclocking ability of the board and then we'll of course get into the most important part; the performance.

The Package

The ASRock Fatal1ty Z68 Professional Gen3 carries with it, like the Extreme7, a really big box that opens up to give us a look at the board while also offering us a list of the features that are on offer and what exactly they're able to do for us.

Inside the package consists of a Quick Install Guide, Software Setup Guide, Driver CD, six SATA II cables, SLI Bridge, HDMI to DVI convertor, Floppy and IDE cable, 3.5mm audio jack and two Molex to SATA power convertors. Along with all this, we've also got a front panel tray that houses two USB 3.0 ports.