ASRock 990FX Extreme9 Motherboard
Introduction
Contents
Not many motherboard manufacturers are releasing new motherboards for AMD CPUs lately, since AMD hasn’t come out with a new chipset since 2011. Breaking this trend, ASRock released the 990FX Extreme9, a high-end socket AM3+ motherboard. Let’s see what this motherboard has to offer.
The AMD 990FX chipset is basically an AMD 890FX chipset with a new name and supports the higher HyperTransport 3.0 speeds (up to 10.4 GB/s a.k.a. 5.2 GT/s) that weren’t used before and are supported by the FX processors from AMD.
So far, ASRock has launched four different motherboard models based on the AMD 990FX chipset; we list the differences between them in the table below. Prices were researched at Newegg.com on the day we published this article.
|
Specification |
990FX Extreme9 |
Fatal1ty 990FX Professional |
990FX Extreme4 |
990FX Extreme3 |
|
Form Factor |
ATX |
ATX |
ATX |
ATX |
|
Memory Sockets |
4 |
4 |
4 |
4 |
|
PCI Express x16 2.0 |
4 (x16/x4/x16/x0 or x16/x4/x8/x8) |
3 (x16/x16/x4) |
3 (x16/x16/x4) |
3 (x16/x16/x4) |
|
PCI Express x1 2.0 |
1 |
2 |
2 |
1 |
|
Standard PCI |
1 |
2 |
2 |
2 |
|
CrossFireX |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
SLI |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
SATA-300 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
SATA-600 |
8 |
6 |
8 |
5 |
|
eSATA-300 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
eSATA-600 |
2 |
2 |
1 |
1 |
|
USB 2.0 |
8 |
10 |
10 |
12 |
|
USB 3.0 |
8 |
6 |
4 |
2 |
|
FireWire |
2 |
2 |
2 |
0 |
|
Gigabit Ethernet |
1 |
2 |
1 |
1 |
|
Audio |
ALC898 |
ALC892 |
ALC892 |
ALC892 |
|
Voltage Regulator |
12+2 |
12+2 |
8+2 |
4+1 |
|
Price |
NA |
USD 170 |
USD 140 |
USD 120 |
You can see the ASRock 990FX Extreme9 motherboard in Figure 1.
Figure 1: ASRock 990FX Extreme9 motherboard