ASRock 890GX Extreme4 Motherboard Review

The ASRock 890GX Extreme4 motherboard is supplied in a large dark-blue box.  The front is decorated with information about the board's most interesting features and the back contains a breakdown of the features and specifications in much more detail.

The bundle supplied with the motherboard is extensive to say the least.  We find the usual manual which details all aspects of the motherboard alongside a driver / software DVD, a BIOS manual, four SATA cables, a USB3.0 front panel bezel and an I/O faceplate.

We find three PCI Express x16 slots on the board which support 3-way CrossFireX and Hybrid CrossFire.  There are also three PCI slots between these for further expansion if needed.

The four DDR3 memory slots support up to 16GB of ram with a maximum frequency of 1866MHz when overclocked.  For Dual-Channel to be enabled with two sticks of RAM, they must be inserted into slots of the same colour, either blue or white.

There are five SATA3 (6.0Gbps) ports at the base of the board which are white in colour and support RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10.  We would usually expect more SATA ports than this on such a motherboard but we cant imagine that many people will actually use this many so this is forgivable.

ASRock have been very generous when it comes to external connections. The 890GX Extreme4 supports up to 10x USB2.0 ports and 4x USB3.0 port, two of which are on the motherboard panel with the other two are accessible using the front bezel.  Alongside the two USB3.0 ports on the motherboard panel, there are 4x USB2.0 ports, a VGA port, a DVI-D port, a HDMI connector, an eSATA3 port, a gigabit ethernet jack, an optical S/PDIF port, an IEEE1394 port, a PS/2 keyboard port, 6x 3.5mm audio jacks and a clear CMOS button.

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