ASRock Z68 Pro3 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 SATA ports are located at one of the corners of the motherboard, so a video card won’t block them. Being a mainstream product, it doesn’t come with additional SATA-600 or eSATA ports.

Figure 4: SATA-300 (blue) and SATA-600 (white) ports

There is no support for a floppy disk drive controller or an ATA-133 port.

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 two USB 3.0 ports, available on the motherboard rear panel and controlled by an EtronTech EJ168A chip.

There are no FireWire ports.

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.

The portrayed motherboard comes with shared analog audio outputs. This means that if you install an analog 7.1 speaker set you will have to use the line in or the mic in jack, “killing” one of these inputs. An analog 5.1 speaker set can be used without “killing” these inputs. The board has a digital SPDIF output, and digital audio is also available through the on-board HDMI connector. You can either install a coaxial SPDIF jack or route digital audio to your video card to have digital audio in the HDMI connector using the available “HDMI_SPDIF1” header.

This 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 connector, four USB 2.0 ports, VGA output, DVI-D output, HDMI output, two USB 3.0 ports (blue), Gigabit Ethernet port, optical SPDIF output, and shared 7.1 analog audio outputs.

Figure 5: Motherboard rear panel