ASRock 880G Extreme3 & 890FX Deluxe3
Motherboard Layout:
The ASRock 880G Extreme3 motherboard deploys the AMD 880G Northbridge with the SB850 Southbridge. This Socket AM3 motherboard supports up through AMD's latest Phenom II X6 six-core CPUs and does support Unlock CPU Core for allowing extra cores on some X2/X3 CPUs to access all four cores if present or some X4 CPUs that are actually six-core CPUs. This motherboard also supports Turbo UCC for easy CPU overclocking, ASRock True 333 which they call for providing full support for PCI Express graphics cards with Serial ATA 3.0 and USB 3.0 at full-speed, a heatpipe cooler for the MOSFETs, ATI CrossFireX Support, Instant Boot, and Instant Flash. The capacitors on this motherboard are the ASRock DuraCap Japanese Conductive Polymer Capacitors.
ASRock's 880G Extreme3 has four DDR3 memory slots that support up to DDR3-1333MHz memory or DDR3-1800/1600MHz when using one of the overclocking options. Next to the DDR3 system memory slots is the 24-pin ATX power connector while moving south on the motherboard are some of the more interesting components. The AMD SB850 Southbridge is covered by a nicely styled aluminum heatsink that is topped with ASRock's moniker. Along the edge of the ATX motherboard PCB are six Serial ATA ports that are rotated 90 degrees and a single IDE connector that is also rotated 90 degrees along the edge of the PCB. Conveniently found on the motherboard is also a port-80 LED display, the CMOS battery, and power/reset switches that are found directly on the motherboard PCB.
The expansion slots on the 880G Extreme3 are three PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots, one PCI Express 2.0 x1 slot, and three PCI slots. While there are three PCI Express x16 slots, the bottom-most PCI-E x16 slot is limited to x4 speeds while the top-most slot can operate with full PCI-E x16 bandwidth unless the second PCI Express x16 slot is occupied, in which case the two slots are each limited to PCI-E x8 bandwidth. Below the PCI slot on this motherboard are the USB 2.0/3.0 headers.
Cooling the AMD 880G chipset and the power circuitry near the CPU socket are aluminum heatsinks that are connected together via a single heatpipe. This motherboard is compatible with AMD's AM3 Phenom II X3 / X4 / X3 / X2, Sempron, and Athlon II X4 / X3 / X2 CPUs. Near the top edge of the motherboard is the 4/8-pin 12V power connector. The rear I/O panel ports on this motherboard include PS/2 keyboard, one VGA D-Sub, one DVI-D, one HDMI output, one optical S/PDIF output, four USB 2.0 ports, one eSATA2 connector, one eSATA3 connector via the expansion slot bracket, two USB 3.0 ports, one Gigabit Ethernet, one IEEE-1394 Firewire, one clear CMOS switch, and the standard analog audio jacks.