ASRock 775Dual-880Pro

Board Layout:

From our past experience with ASRock's Dual Series, the layout of the motherboard is far different from any other conventional motherboard on the market. The design does hold true for the 775Dual-880Pro with its support not only for two graphics interfaces but also for the memory. As the 775Dual-880Pro utilizes the PT880 Pro Chipset, ASRock engineers were able to implement VIA's StepUp Technology that allows for use of DDR or DDR2, although not supported simultaneously. ASRock states DDR2 667/533/400 and DDR 400/333/266 support, VIA on the other hand reports the memory support for 533/400 and 400/333/266, respectively. On the motherboard, the two DDR slots are colored blue while the DDR2 slots remain yellow. Below the system memory slots on the motherboard's PCB, are two ATA133 IDE connectors, which are immediately next to two SATA 150 connectors. Powering these interfaces is the VIA VT8237R Southbridge. The SATA RAID modes supported by the VT8237R are RAID 0, 1, and JBOD.

Running along the bottom edge of the 775Dual-880Pro PCB are the front panel connectors, 3-pin fan connector, AMI 4MB BIOS chip, and two USB2.0 headers. Unfortunately, excluding the CPU fan connector, there is only one other fan connector on the motherboard; that is a bit troubling considering the large quantities found on other motherboards and the number of fans enthusiasts are using in their system. To the left of the VIA Southbridge is the CMOS battery along with the jumper. Although ASRock has steered away from their previous design of requiring a paper clip or similar metal item to clear the CMOS, they fail to include a jumper cap that is dedicated for clearing the CMOS. Nevertheless, you can easily remove a jumper cap temporarily from an alternative location on the motherboard while clearing the CMOS; this is just a small item to address.

Towards the end of the motherboard, below the four PCI slots is the floppy disk connector, which has become the commonplace for the relatively un-used connector while next to that is the game connector along with the front panel audio headers. To the left of the four PCI slots, is the LAN controller along with the Realtek ALC850 8-channel audio chip. The LAN controller used on the ASRock 775Dual-880Pro is the VIA VT6103. Unfortunately, the controller is rated for 10/100; as a Gigabit controller would have most likely led to an increase in manufacturing costs. On the other hand, the VT6103 generally works great under Linux, even with the 2.4 kernel.