ASRock 890GX Extreme3 Motherboard
On-Board Peripherals (Cont’d)
Contents
Eight-channel audio is generated by the chipset using a VIA VT2020 codec. Unfortunately this component isn’t listed on VIA’s website, but at least the product manual says that it presents a 110 dB signal-to-noise ratio on its outputs, which is a professional-grade number. 890GX Extreme3 comes with an on-board optical SPDIF output and you can add a coaxial SPDIF output installing an adapter on the motherboard “HDMI_SPDIF1” header.
The analog audio connectors are independent if you have a 5.1 analog speaker system, but if you have a 7.1 analog speaker system you will have to “kill” either the “mic in” or the “line in” jack to install it. This may not be a problem for most users, since if you want a 7.1 audio system you will probably connect the motherboard to a home theater receiver or a digital speaker set using either the SPDIF or the HDMI connector.
ASRock 890GX Extreme3 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 PS/2 connector, four USB 2.0 ports, VGA output, DVI-D output, HDMI output, clear CMOS button, one FireWire port, one eSATA-300 port, one Gigabit Ethernet port, two USB 3.0 ports, optical SPDIF output and shared analog 7.1 audio outputs.
Figure 7: Motherboard rear panel.
As you can see, this motherboard comes with three different kinds of video connectors, but only two of them can be used at the same time.
No mouse PS/2 connector is available, thus you have to use a USB mouse with this motherboard.
Another feature available on this motherboard is a POST diagnostics display, which allows you to detect, through a two-digit code, what is wrong with your computer if it is not turning on. This feature is shown in Figure 5.
In Figure 8, you can see all accessories that come with this motherboard. It comes with an eSATA bracket, so you can transform any of the internal SATA-600 ports into an eSATA-600 port.
Figure 8: Accessories.