There is a whole heap of things to like about the 990FX Professional, starting with the very cool colour scheme and heatsink design, gold caps, blistering stock performance and even down to the decent bundle of accessories. The board consistently outperformed the GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD7 at stock settings, sometimes by a fair margin. This is a very impressive effort from ASRock, and cements their ever growing positive reputation amongst the enthusiasts in the UK, and indeed the world.

Features such as dual LAN and the Fatal1ty mouse port set this board apart from the competition, and it’s also worthy of note that most of the competition is slightly more (~£10) expensive than the 990FX Professional, which leaves it in a very strong position. The ability to use SLI or Crossfire also adds to the flexibility you have with this platform, as well as plenty of USB3.0 support and SATA 6Gbps across the board. There is also a large amount of connectivity with the 990FX Professional, which is typical of ASRock to provide and a welcome addition that a lot of the competition don't have, even when spending in this price range.



As much as we’d love to say it was all plain sailing with ASRock’s top end board, it wasn't entirely. The main issue that was encountered was the overclocking performance. We could only take our AMD 1100T to 3.9Ghz, whereas using the GIGABYTE UD7, we managed a slightly better 4.2GHz with the same CPU. The UEFI BIOS was sometimes laggy (EDIT: fixed - see below) and difficulties with the BIOS temperature readings and fan control. In fact, a lot of the issues the 990FX Professional has may well be solved with BIOS update, so we'll put these down as small issues now, that very well may be rectified. The BIOS the board came with was just the initial release, we'll keep you posted with any developments and by the time the FX CPUs are here, there may be a BIOS update where these small bugs have been ironed out. The overclocking performance may even be down to optimisation for FX CPUs and not Phenom II architecture, as with an impressive V12 CPU phase, performance should be top notch. We'll be taking another look at the rather impressive 990FX Professional when we get our hands on an AMD FX CPU.

Overall, we have a feature-rich, innovative and top performing motherboard that looks the part, but has a few niggles with overclocking and the BIOS. Should you consider it when buying into the AMD platform? Certainly. Is the competition better? Not entirely. Is this board good value for money? Definitely.







Click here for an explanation of our awards at Vortez.net.