ASRock 890FX Deluxe4 Motherboard

On-Board Peripherals

The AMD 890FX chipset is a dual-chip solution, using the SB850 south bridge chip. This chip natively supports six SATA-600 ports (with RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10). If that wasn’t enough, ASRock added two extra SATA-600 ports (controlled by a Marvel 88SE9120 chip, no RAID support), for a total of eight SATA-600 ports.

The SATA-600 ports controlled by the chipset are placed on the motherboard edge, rotated 90°, so video cards won’t block them, as you can see in Figure 4. This motherboard has one ATA-133 port controlled by a VIA VT6330 chip (which is also a FireWire controller), which is also placed rotated on the motherboard edge. The other two SATA-600 ports are located on the motherboard edge near the third PCI Express x16 slot, as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 4: SATA-600 and ATA-133 ports

Figure 5: SATA-600 ports

This motherboard also has an eSATA-600 port on its rear panel. How this port is connected to the system is a mystery to us, because there is no extra controller chip available for this port and there are no ports left on the south bridge chip or on the Marvell 88SE9120 chip. Our best guess is that it is connected in parallel to one of the available ports in the system, but ASRock doesn’t make this clear.

A floppy disk drive controller is present, driven by the Super I/O chip (Nuvoton NCT6775F).

This motherboard has 10 USB 2.0 ports, six soldered on the rear panel and four available through two headers located on the motherboard. This product also has two USB 3.0 ports at its rear panel, controlled by a NEC μPD720200 chip, and another two USB 3.0 ports available through a header, controlled by another NEC μPD720200 chip. The board comes with an aluminum-made 3.5” adapter for you to install these two extra USB 3.0 on the front panel of your case.

Figure 6: USB 3.0 adapter