ASRock A780FullDisplayPort
Motherboard Layout:
While ASRock is regarded as a manufacturer of economically minded motherboards, as of late they have been offering some impeccable products. Their build quality and designs have generally been good, though as of late they've been venturing into more high-end features on their motherboards such as integrated WiFi, all-solid capacitors, and offering more products using the latest chipsets from AMD and Intel, such as the new X48 Express. What's special about the A780FullDisplayPort is its Radeon HD 3200 graphics with DisplayPort capabilities. Starting our tour of this micro ATX motherboard in the upper right hand corner are four DDR2 DIMM slots. These slots are compatible with DDR2 memory up to DDR2-1066MHz speeds with a maximum capacity of 8GB non-ECC unbuffered memory. Between these memory slots and the edge of the motherboard PCB is some power circuitry as well as the single IDE connector.
In the bottom right hand corner of the ASRock A780FullDisplayPort are six Serial ATA 2.0 connectors, two USB 2.0 headers, FDD connector, CMOS battery, and the southbridge. The southbridge on this motherboard is the AMD SB700. The SB700 series is quite a boost over the earlier SB600 chips and it supports up to six SATA 2.0 ports in RAID 0/1/10, eSATA, 14 USB ports, I/O acceleration technology, IrDA capabilities, DASH 1.0, and IDM/TPM. Cooling the SB700 is a small passively cooled aluminum heatsink.
The expansion slots on this motherboard include one PCI Express x16, one PCI Express x1, and two PCI slots. The PCI Express x16 slot is compatible with Hybrid CrossFireX, for splitting the graphics rendering workload between a supported ATI PCI-E GPU and the integrated 780G.
Tucked between the PCI Express x16 slot and the CPU socket is the northbridge, which is of course the AMD 780G. The AM2+ CPU socket supports AMD Phenom, Athlon 64 X2, Athlon 64, and Sempron processors. In this corner of the motherboard are the 24-pin and 4-pin power connectors.
At the rear I/O panel are two PS/2, VGA, DVI, six USB 2.0, one Firewire, one Gigabit ethernet, and three audio ports. The Firewire on this motherboard is provided by a VIA VT6308S IEEE-1394a ASIC and the audio codec used is a Realtek ALC662.
The DisplayPort interface is provided by using the supplied add-in card.