ASRock Fatal1ty Z68 Professional Gen3 Motherboard

On-Board Peripherals

The Intel Z68 chipset is a single-chip solution and is also known as PCH (Platform Controller Hub). This chip supports two SATA-600 ports and four SATA-300 ports, supporting RAID (0, 1, 5 and 10). The manufacturer added four additional SATA-600 ports, controlled by an ASMedia ASM1061 chip. There are some limitations here. The ASMedia ASM1061 chip provides only two SATA-600 ports, and there is only one chip but four ports. The manual and the product page don’t explain how this is possible. Since the SATA ports controlled by the chipset support RAID but the extra SATA-600 ports don’t, in our opinion the manufacturer should have used a different color on the SATA-600 ports controlled by the chipset (which are the SATA3_0 and SATA3_1 ports). Also, the SATA3_A4 is shared with the eSATA-600 port, therefore, they can’t be used simultaneously. The SATA ports are located on the motherboard edge rotated 90°, so video cards won’t block them.

Figure 6: SATA-300 ports (black) and SATA-600 ports (red)

Amazingly, this motherboard brings a floppy disk drive controller, which is located near the third PCI Express x16 slot, and one ATA-133 port, which is located beside the main power supply connector. This ATA-133 port is provided by a VIA VT6330 chip, which is also a FireWire (IEEE1394) controller.

This motherboard has eight USB 2.0 ports, four soldered on the rear panel and four available through two headers located on the motherboard. It also has six USB 3.0 ports, four available on the motherboard rear panel and two available through a front panel connector, controlled by three ASMedia ASM1042 chips. The motherboard comes with an adapter for you to install these two ports in an external 3.5” bay.

One of the USB 2.0 ports of the motherboard rear panel is a special “mouse port,” where you can manually adjust the port’s polling rate (i.e., how many times per second the port reads the mouse value) from 125 Hz to 1 kHz.

This motherboard has two FireWire ports, one available on the motherboard rear panel and one available through a header on the motherboard. These ports are controlled by the abovementioned VIA VT6630 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 ALC892 codec. Finally, Realtek is disclosing the specifications of this chip, which include 97 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the analog outputs, 90 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the analog inputs, and up to 192 kHz sampling rate for both inputs and outputs. These specs are good for the mainstream user, but if you are looking into working professionally with audio editing, you should look for a motherboard that provides an SNR of at least 97 dB for the analog input. We think this is one of the major drawbacks of this motherboard: it was designed as a high-end product, but uses a mid-range audio codec.

The Fatal1ty Z68 Professional Gen3 comes with an on-board optical SPDIF output, and you can add a coaxial SPDIF connector by installing an adapter on the available “HDMI_SPDIF1” header. This header can also be used to route digital audio to add-on video cards to have digital audio in the card’s HDMI output. (Some video cards don’t require this connection.)

The portrayed motherboard comes with independent analog 5.1 audio outputs, meaning that if you install an analog 7.1 speaker set, you will need to use either the “line in” or the “mic in” jacks.

This motherboard has two Gigabit Ethernet ports, controlled by two Realtek RTL8111E chips, supporting the “teaming” feature, which doubles the network transfer rate if you use a compatible switch.

In Figure 7, you can see the motherboard rear panel, with a keyboard PS/2 connector, four USB 2.0 ports, VGA connector, two HDMI connectors, clear CMOS button, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, four USB 3.0 ports (blue connectors), one FireWire (IEEE1394) port, one eSATA-600 port, optical SPDIF output, and shared analog 7.1 audio outputs.

Figure 7: Motherboard rear panel