ASRock 890GX Extreme4 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 the ASRock 890GX Extreme4 provides five of the six SATA-600 ports supported by the chipset. The sixth port was routed to the rear panel of the motherboard, making this product to have an eSATA-600 port. All ports support RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10.

Those five SATA-600 ports are placed at one of the corners of the motherboard, where video cards won’t block them, as you can see in Figure 5.

Figure 5: SATA-600 ports

No parallel ATA (PATA a.k.a. IDE) or floppy disk drive port are present.

This motherboard has 10 USB 2.0 ports, four soldered on the rear panel and six through three 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 ports on the front panel of your case.

Figure 6: USB 3.0 adapter

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 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 890GX Extreme4 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.

The ASRock 890GX Extreme4 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-600 port, one Gigabit Ethernet port, two USB 3.0 ports, an 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 8.

Figure 8: POST diagnostics display and USB 3.0 and FireWire headers

Other smaller features present at the 890GX Extreme4 include the presence of on-board power and reset buttons, a legacy serial port (available through a header on the motherboard, but the motherboard doesn’t come with the required adapter to us it), and an infrared interface (you need to buy the optical components to use it). It also has a core unlocking feature (called “UCC” by ASRock), which allows you to unlock hidden cores from certain AMD CPUs.