ASRock P67 Pro3 Motherboard
On-Board Peripherals
Contents
The Intel P67 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 SATA ports are located on the motherboard edge, way from the PCI Express x16 slot, so a long video card won’t block them.
Figure 4: SATA-300 (blue) and SATA-600 (white) ports
The motherboard has an eSATA-600 port, which is shared with the SATA3_1 connector, meaning that you cannot use this eSATA-600 port when you have a hard drive or SSD installed on the SATA3_1 connector.
Differently from all other P67-based motherboards we’ve seen so far, the P67 Pro3 comes with a floppy disk drive controller. It doesn’t come with an ATA-133 port.
This motherboard has 12 USB 2.0 ports, six soldered on the rear panel and six available though three headers located on the motherboard. It also has two USB 3.0 ports controlled by an EtronTech EJ168A chip.
No FireWire (IEEE1394) ports are available.
The P67 Pro3 comes with eight-channel audio, generated by the chipset using a Realtek ALC892 codec. Unfortunately Realtek doesn’t publish technical data about this chip, so we can’t comment on the quality of the on-board audio.
The portrayed motherboard comes with on-board optical and coaxial SPDIF connectors, and you can route digital audio to your video card to have digital audio in the HDMI connector using the available “HDMI_SPDIF1” header.
The analog audio jacks are completely independent, so you won’t “kill” the mic in or the line in jack when installing a set of 7.1 analog speakers.
The portrayed motherboard has one Gigabit Ethernet port, controlled by a Realtek RTL8111E chip.
In Figure 5, you can see the motherboard rear panel, with PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors, external clear CMOS button, coaxial and optical SPDIF outputs, six USB 2.0 ports, eSATA-600 port, two USB 3.0 ports (blue ones), one Gigabit Ethernet port, and independent analog 7.1 audio outputs.
Figure 5: Motherboard rear panel