Legit Motherboard Reviews
ASRock 880G Extreme3 Motherboard Review
| Manufacturer: | ASRock |
| Product: | ASRock 880G Extreme3 Motherboard |
| Date: | Tue, Aug 31, 2010 - 12:00 AM |
| Written By: | Jason Petermann - |
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Board Layout
The ASRock 880G Extreme3 is a very nice looking board with its complimentary colors and design. It has a classic and simple layout that was very easy to work with. As you can see, this board, as many others do, has a heatpipe to help control temps of the system. Let's take a closer look.
The top right corner is the location of our DDR3 dimm slots. This board supports up to 16GB of DDR3 memory at speeds of 1800 (Overclocked)/1600 (Overclocked)/1333/1066/800MHz. It also supports dual-channel memory configuration. You can also see the 24-pin power connector here at the edge of the board, as well as two fan headers.
As we move down the board, we have our southbridge covered by the aluminum heatsink. Next to that, we have our SATA connectors which support RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1 and RAID 5, NCQ, AHCI and "Hot Plug" functions and are SATA3 compliant. Take a closer look at them in the next pic:
Also at this portion of the board we have the LED troubleshooter and one of my favorite additions to boards recently, the Power and Reset buttons! You also have your front panel pin connections here.
The bottom left of the board is filled with several USB and Firewire headers. It also is where we find our PCI and PCIe slots. The ASRock 880G Express3 has three x16 PCIe slots, one x1 PCIe slot and three legacy PCI slots.
Audio on the board is supplied by the VIA VT2020 Audio Codec which supports 7.1 channel HD audio and Premium Blu-Ray audio. Gigabit LAN is powered by the Realtek RTL8111E chip. The ASRock 880G Extreme3 also has USB 3.0, which is supported by the NEC MPD720200 and sports USB 1.0/2.0/3.0 up to 5Gb/s.
The top left of the board is the home of our 8-pin 12V connector as well as the CPU socket and the top of the heat-pipe that runs over the board. Using an aftermarket cooler does not look to be an issue, as there is plenty of room on the board for installation.
The I/O ports on the board include:
- 1 x PS/2 Keyboard Port
- 1 x VGA/D-Sub Port
- 1 x VGA/DVI-D Port
- 1 x HDMI Port
- 1 x Optical SPDIF Out Port
- 4 x Ready-to-Use USB 2.0 Ports
- 1 x eSATA2 Connector
- 1 x eSATA3 Connector through the Bundled eSATA3 Bracket
- 2 x Ready-to-Use USB 3.0 Ports
- 1 x RJ-45 LAN Port with LED (ACT/LINK LED and SPEED LED)
- 1 x IEEE 1394 Port
- 1 x Clear CMOS Switch with LED
- HD Audio Jack: Rear Speaker / Central / Bass / Line in / Front Speaker / Microphone
Overall, this board has plenty of features on it to be considered a high end enthusiast board. The question now becomes one of performance and overclocking ability!
Next Page - Bundle and BIOS
| Review Index |
|
Page 1 - ASRock 880G Extreme3 Motherboard
Page 2 - Board Layout Page 3 - Bundle and BIOS Page 4 - Test Setup Page 5 - Testing Results Page 6 - Power Consumption Page 7 - Overclocking Page 8 - Final Thoughts on the ASRock 880G Extreme3 Motherboard |
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