ASUS M5A97 R2.0 Motherboard

On Board Peripherals

The AMD 970 chipset is a two-chip solution, and it is combined with the SB950 south bridge chip. The SB950 chip has six SATA-600 ports, supporting RAID (0, 1, 10, and 5). The ASUS M5A97 R2.0 brings only those six ports.

Figure 4: The six SATA-600 ports

The AMD 970 chipset supports 14 USB 2.0 ports. The ASUS M5A97 R2.0 offers 12 ports, six located on the rear panel and six available through three headers located on the motherboard. It also offers four USB 3.0 ports, two on the motherboard rear panel and two available through a header on the motherboard. The USB 3.0 ports are controlled by two ASMedia ASM1042 chips.

The ASUS M5A97 R2.0 does not offer a FireWire port.

This motherboard supports 7.1 audio format using a Realtek ALC887 codec. This codec has the same specifications as the Realtek ALC892, except that the ALC892 has two extra channels for audio streaming. The main specifications of this codec 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, with 24-bit resolution. 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 inputs.

The analog outputs are independent, meaning that you don’t need to share any of them when using a 7.1 analog speaker set. The motherboard has on-board optical SPDIF output.

The portrayed motherboard has one Gigabit Ethernet port, controlled by a Realtek 8111F chip.

In Figure 5, you can see the motherboard rear panel with PS/2 connectors for keyboard and mouse, two USB 3.0 ports, an optical SPDIF output, six USB 2.0 ports, one Gigabit Ethernet port, and the analog audio jacks.

Figure 5: Motherboard rear panel