ASRock took the lead from all the other motherboard manufacturers by launching the world's first motherboard that supports the PCI Express 3.0 standard, the Fatal1ty Z68 Professional Gen3.

The main thing about the PCI Express 3.0 is that it can provide a bandwidth of 1 GB/s in one direction (2 GB/s per lane; each lane has two directions). The original PCI Express specification supported 250 MB/s per lane, and PCI Express 2.0 supported 500 MB/s per lane. This means that a PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot provides a maximum transfer rate of 32 GB/s (2 GB/s x 16), whereas a PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot can reach up to 8 GB/s. Bear in mind that you need a PCI Express 3.0 video card to achieve the bandwidth of PCI Express 3.0 slots.

The ASRock Fatal1ty Z68 Professional Gen3 is an LGA1155 socket motherboard based on the Intel Z68 chipset. It features two PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots, one PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot, two PCI Express 2.0 x1 slots, two PCI standard slots, four DDR3-2133 memory sockets, four USB 3.0 ports, six SATA-600 ports, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, 7.1 channel audio, an 18-phase regulator voltage circuit, VGA and HDMI video outputs, and a Fatal1ty USB Mouse Port, which allows polling rate adjustment from 125 Hz to 1000 Hz.  ASRock’s motherboard also supports Virtu and Intel Smart Response technologies.

Information on pricing was not provided.

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