Straight into the board we see that it gets a standard ATX layout. Unfortunately the board’s layout isn’t as clean as what we would like to have seen, even for a board of this budget. The 24-pin power connector along with a molex power connector to supply the PCI Express x16 slots with extra power when in Crossfire mode are located between the northbridge heatsink and the rear I/O ports, a definite pet hate of ours.
The 4-pin power connector on the other hand is located very snugly between the voltage regulators and the rear I/O ports at the top left of the board, definitely the best place on these ATX boards for them unless you are able to sit them in behind the memory slots.
Looking at the area around the CPU socket we see ASRock has kept things neat and tidy. The only large components anywhere near the CPU are the voltage regulator coils. ASRock has gone old school voltage regulation and left the digital design behind here. Four phases are used to feed the CPU, for your Core 2 series and Pentium Dual Core based on Conroe architecture this is more than adequate for a stable voltage whilst keeping the board’s electrical systems cool.
If you want to throw a Pentium D based Prescott or Presler core processor in though, this is only just going to cut it; overclocking would be a definite no no, especially if you throw a 3.2GHz version in, god help you.
Being based on the older 945 series design, there is no need for any extreme cooling measures for the north and southbridge chipsets, with both being passively cooled by single heatsinks on each.
Viewing the rear I/O ports we see that ASRock designs their boards a little different than most. The PS/2 ports are side by side rather than in a stack tower like most. To the left of the PS/2 ports is a single Serial COM 1 port, and above is the single LPT parallel port for older printers and some very old scanners. The two e.SATA ports are stacked together, though they do not work unless you bridge them as stated earlier, a very poor design by ASRock.
The usual USB/RJ-45 stack sits next with the LAN being powered by a Realtek PCI Express Gigabit ethernet controller, and lastly we have two audio tower stacks with each stack having three of the 3.5mm stereo audio ports. We would like to have seen at least an RCA S/PDIF port, since the board is using the HD 7.1 audio codec from Intel’s ICH7R southbridge, but this isn’t the case here.
Lastly, it’s expansion slot time. The board comes equipped with two PCI Express x16 slots. In true marketing hype the 2nd slot (coloured purple) is stamped by ASRock as an AGI (or Advanced Graphics Interface) Express slot. In reality this is a PCI Express x16 slot that is electrically only running at x4. Sound familiar? That’s right, the same way the P956 and P35 chipsets run their Crossfire.
The white PCI Express x16 slot runs at full speed no matter what. This slot runs off the sixteen express lanes provided by the northbridge. The AGI Express (or the 2nd PCI Express x16 slot) runs at x4 speed by four of the six lanes available from the southbridge. A Single PCI Express x1 slot is provided for PCI-E connectivity, and 3 PCI slots make up the last of the slot configuration.
As mentioned before, the ethernet controller uses a PCI Express x1 lane for its interface, taking up the full complement of PCI Express lanes available. A Texas Instruments PCI based Firewire chip is included on one of the six PCI masters available to it through the southbridge.
