ASRock 890FX Deluxe4 Motherboard

On-Board Peripherals (Cont’d)

Two FireWire (IEEE1394) ports are provided, one standard-sized on the rear panel and one through a header on the motherboard. They are controlled by a VIA VT6330 chip.

Eight-channel audio is generated by the chipset using a Realtek ALC892 codec. Unfortunately this component isn’t listed at Realtek’s website. The 890FX Deluxe4 comes with both coxial and optical SPDIF outputs, and you can route digital audio to video cards to have it available on the video card’s HDMI output by installing a cable on the motherboard “SPDIF_O12” header.

The analog audio connectors are independent, so you won’t have to “kill” the line in or mic in jacks if you decide to install an analog 7.1 speaker set.

The ASRock 890FX Deluxe4 has one Gigabit Ethernet port, controlled by a Realtek RTL8111E chip, which is connected to the system using a PCI Express x1 lane and thus not presenting any potential performance issues.

In Figure 7, you can see the motherboard rear panel, with keyboard and mouse PS/2 connectors, clear CMOS button, optical and coaxial SPDIF outputs, six USB 2.0 ports, one Gigabit Ethernet port, one FireWire port, one eSATA-600 port, two USB 3.0 ports, an independent analog 7.1 audio outputs.

Figure 7: Motherboard rear panel

Other smaller features are available. As you can see in Figure 8, this product comes with a POST diagnostics display, allowing you to discover through a two-digit code what is wrong with your computer, if it doesn’t turn on. This board also has on-board power and reset buttons, which are quite handy when debugging your PC.

Figure 8: POST diagnostics display

This motherboard supports one legacy serial port through a header called “COM1” (shown in Figure 5), but it doesn’t come with the I/O bracket that is required to use it. This motherboard also comes with an infrared interface (“IR1” header), allowing you to easily install an infrared sensor to allow your computer to communicate to other infrared devices (e.g., remote control).

It also has a core unlocking feature (called “UCC” by ASRock), which allows you to unlock hidden cores of certain AMD CPUs.

In Figure 9, you can see all the accessories that come with this motherboard.

Figure 9: Accessories