ASRock Z77E-ITX Motherboard

[img]08[/img]

Looking straight ahead you can just about see everything we're dealing with extremely clear thanks to the small nature of the board. We've got a fairly standard design which is again due to the small size of the board, but everything looks pretty tidy. Let's move in a little closer to see just what exactly we're dealing with here on the ASRock Z77E-ITX.

Having a look across the bottom of the board you can see we've got a single PCIe x16 PCIe 3.0 slot that will house what will most likely be some form of video card. One slot is all we ever see on an ITX based board and of course this one is no different. To the left of the slot you can also see some of the gold caps that are present on the board.

Turning the corner you can see two DIMM slots which support up to 16GB of DDR3 at speeds ranging from 1066MHz DDR to 2800MHz DDR via overclocking. We can also see the main 24-pin ATX power connector, front panel header to the left of that and a fan header on the far right hand side.

Heading to the top of the board you can see we've got a USB 3.0 header on the left, next to that we've got two USB 2.0 headers and next to that we've got four SATA ports with two being SATA II and the other two being SATA III. All four SATA ports run off the Intel Z77 chipset.

Sitting around the DIMM area you can see we've also got a WiFi 802.11n module present which supports speeds of up to 300Mbps when using the included antenna that we looked at on the last page.

Tucked up a little in the back corner behind the I/O ports you can see the 8-pin CPU connector and next to that you can see the CMOS battery that is set vertically which helps save room. When it comes to these ITX based boards every little bit of room you can save is important.

Taking a look at the CPU area you can see even though we're dealing with a very small area, the area itself is pretty clean. We can also again see the gold caps that are present on the board here too.

We quickly turn over the motherboard and you can see we've got an mSATA slot present on the back. Again due to the small room available companies have to get a bit more creative with the placement of extras and you can see in this case ASRock offer the mSATA port on the back of the board.

[img]16[/img]

Finally we finish up with the I/O side of things and starting from the left we've got two USB 3.0 connectors and a combo PS2 port. Moving across we've got a Single-Link DVI connector and above that are the two headers for our wireless antenna to plug into. Next up we've got a HDMI and DisplayPort connector and next to that is a clear CMOS button.

Continuing to move across we've got an eSATA II connector and two USB 2.0 connectors, next to that we've got two more USB 3.0 connectors running off the ASMedia ASM1042 controller and above that we've got Gigabit networking via the Broadcom BCM57781 controller. Finally we finish off with five auxiliary connectors and an optical port which all run off the Realtek ALC898 HD audio codec chip.