ASRock 990FX Extreme9 Motherboard

On Board Peripherals

The AMD 990FX chipset is a two-chip solution, and it is combined with the SB950 south bridge chip. The SB950 chip has six SATA-600 ports, supporting RAID (0, 1, 10, and 5). This motherboard has two additional SATA-600 ports, controlled by an ASMedia ASM1061 chip (no RAID support). These two additional ports are shared with the two eSATA-600 ports available, so they cannot be used simultaneously.

The SATA ports are installed on the motherboard edge and rotated 90°, so the installation of video cards won’t block them. The manufacturer used the same color on all SATA ports; we’d prefer if the manufacturer had used a different color to identify the SATA-600 ports controlled by the ASMedia chip.

Figure 4: The six SATA-600 ports controlled by the chipset and the two SATA-600 ports controlled by the ASMedia chip

The AMD 990FX chipset supports 14 USB 2.0 ports. The ASRock 990FX Extreme9 offers eight USB 2.0 ports, four located on the rear panel and four available through two headers located on the motherboard. It also offers eight USB 3.0 ports, four on the motherboard rear panel and four available through two headers on the motherboard. The USB 3.0 ports are controlled by two EtronTech EJ188H chips. The motherboard comes with an adapter for you to install two USB 3.0 ports into an external 3.5” bay from your case.

The ASRock 990FX Extreme9 has two FireWire ports, one available on the motherboard rear panel and one available through a header. These ports are controlled by a VIA VT6315N chip.

This motherboard supports 7.1+2 audio format, i.e., eight channels plus two independent channels for audio streaming. On this motherboard, the audio is generated by the chipset using a Realtek ALC898 codec, which is an outstanding solution, providing an impressive 110 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the analog outputs, 104 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the analog inputs, and up to 192 kHz sampling rate for both inputs and outputs, with 24-bit resolution. This means you are able to capture and edit analog audio (e.g., converting LPs to CDs or MP3, converting VHS to DVDs or any other digital format, etc.) with this motherboard without adding any background noise.

The motherboard has on-board optical and coaxial SPDIF outputs.

The analog outputs are independent, meaning that you don’t need to share any of them when using a 7.1 analog speaker set.

The portrayed motherboard has one Gigabit Ethernet port, controlled by an Intel WG82583V chip. This is probably the first time we’ve seen a motherboard for AMD processors with an Intel networking chip.

In Figure 5, you can see the motherboard rear panel with PS/2 connectors for keyboard and mouse, a clear CMOS button, a coaxial and an optical SPDIF output, four USB 3.0 ports, four USB 2.0 ports, two eSATA-600 ports, one FireWire port, one Gigabit Ethernet port, and the analog audio jacks.

Figure 5: Motherboard rear panel