ASRock Z77 Pro3 Motherboard

Having a look at the board you can see it's pretty much identical to the Z77 Pro3 we looked at the other day. We've got that pretty bland color scheme going on and you can see it's not a huge board. Let's move in a bit closer, though, to see what exactly we're dealing with here today.

Moving in closer you can see on the right we've got two older legacy PCI slots while on the left hand side we've got a single PCIe x1 slot. Between these we've got two PCIe x16 slots with the top slot wired at x16 and the other being wired at only x4.

Moving across the bottom you can see the header line up starting with HD Audio, next to that we've got COM1, IR1, two USB 2.0, fan, main front panel and a speaker header sitting on the far right hand side.

Just like the Z77 Pro3, the SATA ports are split up with four SATA II ports at the bottom running off the Intel Z77 chipset.

As we head to the north end of the board on the far left you can see we've got two more SATA ports present. These two are grey and are both SATA III compared to the SATA II black ones present towards the bottom of the board. We've also got a front USB 3.0 header, main 24-pin ATX power connector and fan header while above all this we've got four DIMM slots supporting up to 32GB of DDR3 ranging from 1066MHz DDR to 2800MHz DDR via overclocking.

Across the top of the board you can see the main 8-pin CPU power connector, two more fan headers and moving back a little we get a better idea of what's going on with the CPU area which as you can see looks pretty clean.

Finally finishing off with the I/O department we can see we start with two USB connectors along with a PS2 connector. Moving across we've got a VGA and HDMI port followed up with two USB 3.0 connectors, two more USB 2.0 connectors, gigabit networking via the Realtek RTL8111E controller and six auxiliary ports that run off the Realtek ALC892 codec.