ASRock 890GX Extreme3 Motherboard

On-Board Peripherals

AMD 890GX chipset is a dual-chip solution. As we mentioned earlier, AMD 890GX is the first chipset to natively support SATA-600 ports and ASRock 890GX Extreme3 provides all the six SATA-600 ports supported by the chipset. These ports support RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10.

These SATA-600 ports are placed on the motherboard edge rotated 90°, so video cards won’t block them, as you can see in Figure 5.

Figure 5: SATA-600 ports.

An eSATA-300 port is provided on the motherboard rear panel.

Even though the chipset supports one parallel ATA (PATA, a.k.a. IDE) port, no port of this kind is provided. Also no floppy disk drive controller is present.

890GX Extreme3 features on-board power and reset buttons, as you can check it out in Figure 6.

Figure 6: On-board power and reset buttons.

This motherboard has 12 USB 2.0 ports, four soldered on the rear panel and eight through four headers located on the motherboard. This product also has two USB 3.0 ports on its rear panel (the blue ones), controlled by a NEC μPD720200 chip.

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 VT6315N.

This motherboard has a legacy serial port, available through a header on the mother
board (you can see it in Figure 3). The motherboard doesn’t come with the necessary adapter for you to use it.