Ports and Connectors


The biggest surprise you will have with this ASRock board is when you first see the I/O connectors. You not only get all the typical ones like keyboard, mouse, usb, but you also get a built in 1394a FireWire connector, a Gigabit LAN connector and even an eSATA port. It is curious why an e-SATA connector is included, as eSATA is far from the popularity levels of USB or FireWire but then again, this is part of the allure of this motherboard.


However, upon closer inspection you realize that this is not a true e-SATA setup. For this eSATA to work you have to first internally connect a standard SATA cable from one of the four SATA ports (the orange one to be precise) and then connect the other end into a SATA connector port located near the I/O ports. In other words this is just a built-in internal SATA to external e-SATA converter. It is not true e-SATA, and it does cost you 25% of your available ports.

Please understand that having eSATA is a great option for some future applications, the issue I have is that ASRock's implantation does leave a lot to be desired. It is quite conceivable that a person who uses eSATA, has just two hard drives and a single SATA CD/DVD drive would find themselves out of SATA connectors. This is a direct limitation of Intel’s ICH7 controller, and this is where this motherboard’s architecture does start to show its age, regardless of how well ASRock has tweaked it.


Another clue that this board is not geared towards any type of enthusiast is the inclusion of a single chassis fan header in additing to the CPU fan connector. Personally, I like plugging my fans into the motherboard when possible instead of having to snake the PSU wires through my case to get to the case fan connectors.


Another thing worth mentioning is that this board uses the older 20pin power connector and the older 4 pin older auxiliary power connector. This does ensure that any power supply will work on this motherboard but it may not provide enough power for the newer power hungry quads without some “v droop” or lowered core voltage issues. Luckily, ASRock includes a 4-pin Molex header to bring some much-needed power to the motherboard just in case you insist on using a more power-hungry processor.


One interesting feature of this ASRock board is that it supports ATI’s Crossfire technology. Even nicer is the implementation of it on this motherboard. On this board Crossfire does not require jumpers to be set nor does it cost you the use of the IDE connector which are all problems that previous ASRock boards reportedly suffered from. In general it’s a nice bonus but for the market segment this board is geared towards its usefulness is suspect. However, to further decrease its cost, the second pci-e slot is only a 4x slot and this can be a potential bottleneck if a customer did decide to use this board with Crossfire graphic cards.