ASRock X79 Extreme9 Motherboard

On-Board Peripherals

The Intel X79 chipset is a single-chip solution, which is also known as a PCH (Platform Controller Hub). This chip supports two SATA-600 ports and four SATA-300 ports, supporting RAID (0, 1, 10, and 5).

The ASRock X79 Extreme9 has another six SATA-600 port
s, controlled by two Marvell 88SE9172 chips and one Marvell 88SE9220 chip. Even though the chips are different, they all support RAID 0 and 1.

One drawback is that the manufacturer used only two colors to identify the SATA ports: black for the SATA-300 and gray for the SATA-600. The manufacturer should have used different colors to identify to where each port is connected. We think they should have used one color for the SATA-600 ports controlled by the chipset (which are the ones to the immediate left of the SATA-300 ports) and another color for the ports controlled by the additional chips.

All SATA ports are located at the motherboard’s edge and rotated 90°, so video cards won’t block them. See Figure 4.

Figure 4: SATA-600 (gray) and SATA-300 (black) ports

This motherboard also has two eSATA-600 ports, controlled by another Marvell 88SE9172 chip.

The Intel X79 chipset supports 14 USB 2.0 ports. Unfortunately, support for USB 3.0 ports isn’t integrated in the chipset yet. The ASRock X79 Extreme9 offers 10 USB 2.0 ports, six soldered on the rear panel and four available through two headers located on the motherboard. It also supports eight USB 3.0 ports, the four located on the motherboard rear panel controlled by a Texas Instruments TUSB7340 chip and the four available on two headers controlled by another Texas Instruments TUSB7340 chip. The motherboard comes with a 3.5” panel containing two USB 3.0 ports for you to use on the motherboard USB 3.0 header if your computer case doesn’t have USB 3.0 ports with an internal connector.

The ASRock X79 Extreme9 has two FireWire ports, one soldered on the rear panel and one available through a header. These ports are controlled by a VIA VT6315N chip.

In order to accommodate the high number of PCI Express devices (eight SATA-600 ports, two eSATA-600 ports and eight USB 3.0 ports), the ASRock X79 Extreme9 uses a PLX PEX8605 switch chip.

This motherboard doesn’t come with on-board audio, as audio is produced by the “Game Blaster” add-on sound card. We will talk about this card on the next page.

The portrayed motherboard has one Gigabit Ethernet port, controlled by a Broadcom BCM57781 chip.

In Figure 5, you can see the motherboard rear panel with a PS/2 keyboard connector, six USB 2.0 ports, a clear CMOS button, one FireWire port, one Gigabit Ethernet port, four USB 3.0 ports, and two eSATA-600 ports.

Figure 5: Motherboard rear panel