ASRock P55 Extreme4 Motherboard

On-Board Peripherals (Cont’d)

A floppy disk drive controller is present, a feature most manufacturers are dropping.

From the 14 USB 2.0 ports supported by the chipset, the P55 Extreme4 offers 12 of them, six soldered on the rear panel and six available through three motherboard headers.

One of the highlights of this motherboard is the presence of four USB 3.0 ports, controlled by two NEC μPD720200 chips. Two of them are placed on the motherboard rear panel, but the other two are available through a header on the motherboard (see Figure 6). The motherboard comes with a nice aluminum-made adapter for you to install these two ports on the front panel of your computer. But since it uses a 3.5” frame, you must have a case with an external 3.5” bay (or with a 5.25”-to-3.5” adapter) in order to use it.

Figure 6: Serial port, floppy disk drive port, and USB 3.0 header

Figure 7: USB 3.0 adapter

No FireWire (IEEE1394) port is provided.

Audio is generated by the chipset using a Realtek ALC892 codec, which is an eigh
t-channel solution supporting THX TrueStudio Pro. Unfortunately Realtek doesn’t publish technical details about this codec. This motherboard comes with on-board optical and coaxial SPDIF outputs. The board also has an SPDIF-out header (labeled “HDMI_SPDIF1”), which can be used to route sound to the video card HDMI output in order for you to have an HDMI output with digital audio on a single connector. As you can see in Figure 8, this motherboard has fully independent analog outputs for all eight audio channels.

The ASRock P55 Extreme4 has one Gigabit Ethernet port, controlled by one Realtek RTL8111E chip, which is connected to the system using one PCI Express x1 lane, and thus not presenting any potential performance issues.

In Figure 8, you can see the motherboard rear panel with PS/2 mouse and keyboard connectors, a clear CMOS button, coaxial and optical SPDIF outputs, six USB 2.0 ports, one eSATA-600 port, two USB 3.0 ports (blue ones), one Gigabit Ethernet port, two USB 3.0 ports (blue ones), and independent analog 7.1 audio outputs.

Figure 8: Motherboard rear panel

Other smaller features are available. This motherboard has an infrared interface (header labeled “IR1”), so you can add infrared devices to this motherboard by simply buying an infrared sensor. The motherboard comes with one legacy serial port (see Figure 6), but you will need an adapter to use it. And it comes with a POST diagnostics display (see Figure 4), which shows, through a two-digit code, why your computer is not turning on.

Another smaller but very interesting feature is the presence of holes for socket LGA775 CPU coolers, allowing you to install CPU coolers that are not officially compatible with socket LGA1156 CPUs.