The Motherboard Continued

Heading north, we can see our four RAM slots which support up to 32GB of DDR3 memory ranging from speeds of 1066MHz DDR to 2133MHz DDR. Below these RAM slots you can see we've got three more headers with the first one on the left being a USB 3.0 one.

Next to our USB 3.0 header we've got an IDE connector and next to that we've got our main 24-Pin power connector. The inclusion of IDE / Floppy is a weird one for me; I'm not sure of anyone who uses the technology these days, I really can't remember the last time I've actually seen a device that makes use of either connection. Even hard drives that I have floating around from yesteryear are all SATA.

Moving away from the RAM slots and to the CPU area, we can see our main 8-Pin CPU connector and the socket itself which is pretty clean. We can also see those sexy looking gold caps we saw on the Extreme7. The heatsink setup is pretty good and typically high quality as we'd expect out of ASRock.

Getting into the I/O side of things, you can see we've got a PS/2 port on the left and two USB 2.0 ports. Next to that we've got a VGA port and two HDMI out ports for video connectivity. Also here, we can see a clear CMOS button, just in case you do something a little wrong in the BIOS.

Next up, we've got two USB 3.0 ports controlled via the ASMedia ASM1042 controller and a Gigabit networking port running off the Realtek RTL8111E controller. Next to that we've got two more USB 3.0 ports, Firewire and a combo eSATA / USB 2.0 port with the same USB 3.0 / Gigabit networking setup seen again. Finally, we've got five analog audio connectors and an optical out running via the Realtek ALC892 Audio Codec.