ASRock Fatal1ty Z77 Professional Review - IDE and Floppy on Z77
by Ian Cutress on May 20, 2012 1:30 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- ASRock
- Fatal1ty
- 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.
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Chaitanya - Sunday, May 20, 2012 - link
I am wondering how many people actually use floppy drive in this day and age when OS can install RAID drivers off a USB thumb drive and motherboards can flash bios even without having a CPU installed.shabby - Sunday, May 20, 2012 - link
How else will people make floppy music? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgfPYetWWJwNow wheres my printer port!
SlyNine - Sunday, May 20, 2012 - link
Thanks man, made my day!MonkeyPaw - Sunday, May 20, 2012 - link
That is awesome. Seems like something at the end of a Portal game.anirudhs - Sunday, May 20, 2012 - link
There used to be a time when booting into Linux was only possible using a floppy drive.CharonPDX - Thursday, May 24, 2012 - link
There used to be a time when booting into *ANY* OS was only possible using a floppy drive.Heck, Windows XP required a floppy drive to load storage drivers if you weren't using a supported storage controller. (Which could be worked around if you were really dedicated, but for the average home user...)
But since Windows Vista, we have no legitimate reason for the floppy drive to be internal as opposed to USB.
Many motherboard makers have a "legacy" motherboard available, that includes these things (plus serial and parallel ports,) for those customers that truly need them. But a gamer doesn't. I haven't *NEEDED* a floppy drive since at least 2006. Yes, I've *USED* one since, but a USB one works just fine for everything I've needed to use it for. Nearly the same for PATA. I can't think of any gamer that still has an PATA drive sitting around that they just *NEED* to use. Yeah, digging data off an old retired PATA drive is nice, but there are (SHOCK!) USB-to-PATA adapters that work just fine. (And since the absolute fastest PATA drives are barely equal to USB 2.0, the speed "hit" doesn't matter.)
I have a vintage computer collection, and use PATA, SCSI, even ESDI hard drives; along with 1.44 MB floppies, and even all the way back to 5.25" single-sided floppies, on a regular basis.
But I don't need support for any of them in my gaming PC. (Then again, I also bought the Abit AT7-MAX motherboard when it first came out, lacking PS/2, serial, and parallel ports when leaving them off was controversial. So maybe I'm just someone who is perfectly happy to ditch legacy on modern gear before others.)
It would be one thing if most boards still had them, but they don't. I don't even get the inclusion of the PS/2 port on many "gaming" boards these days. Does anyone still use a PS/2 keyboard or mouse on their modern "gaming" system? Haven't all gamers moved on to new fancy laser mice? (Or whatever the fad-of-the-minute is.)
DanNeely - Sunday, May 20, 2012 - link
when all the previous generation of boards yanked pata/floppy support there were enough people sending protest letters to convince most of the mobo makers to add it back for at least a few models.Personally I suspect they would've been better off jointly designing a pata/floppy pcie 1x card for the legacy device brigade.
Lazlo Panaflex - Monday, May 21, 2012 - link
Asrock has included IDE and floppy connectors in various boards since the Dual-VSTA days...this is nothing new. Plus, some people still have decent IDE stuff laying around (i.e. DVD burners). Some older versions of Ghost run off a floppy.SlyNine - Sunday, May 20, 2012 - link
The reason I bought the board was because AsRocks name is a much better commodity then it was back in the A64 days. I bought it because I AsRocks name had proven itself, and I needed a motherboard with a hella lot of HDD ports. This build has been on 24/7 and up for weeks at a time before rebooting for 6 months so I'm glad I got the motherboard afterall. All the Fatality 1 did was make me not want it. But again needed the 10 HDD ports.I don't care about the Fatality 1 on the board at all. Used to play a ton of FPS's and I'm very very good at them. To bad I moved to a place with crappy internet, and was forced to buy a LCD. Makes all the difference in the world!
AssBall - Monday, May 21, 2012 - link
So you moved somewhere with crappy internet and need 10 drives spinning all the time on an ATX board... because that's not pointless, inefficient, or unrealistic at all....