ASRock Z77 Extreme6 Motherboard

Looking straight on the new ASRock Z77 Extreme6 doesn't look too different to other ASRock boards we've seen lately with the sweet black and gold color scheme, which we really like a lot. Let's move in a little closer, though, to see what exactly we're dealing with here today.

Having a look here we can see on the far left we've got an extra power connector for when you're going to make use of SLI / CrossFire. On the expansion slot front we've got two legacy PCI slots, one PCIe x1 slot and three PCIe x16 slots. Towards the middle we can also see our mSATA slot. While we won't be using it today, it's something we'll be making use of soon.

Moving to the bottom of the board you can see we've got a HD Audio port on the left followed by a COM1 port and surprisingly a floppy connector. Moving across we've got Firewire, two USB 2.0 headers, clear CMOS header, speaker header and our main front panel header.

Turning the corner you can see we've got a power and reset button in the bottom left corner and just behind that you can see the LED debug reader, which helps us diagnose any problems we might run into.

On the SATA front we've got a total of eight ports. We've got four black SATA II ports that run of the Intel controller along with two blue SATA III ports that run off the same controller. Furthermore we've got another two blue SATA III ports which run off the ASMedia ASM1061 controller.

Moving away from the bottom of the board and heading towards the top end we've got the main 24-pin ATX power connector and next to that you can see the USB 3.0 header. We've also got four DDR3 DIMM slots which support memory running at over 2800MHz via overclocking.

Towards the top of the board you can see the main 8-pin CPU power connector and moving back a little we can see we've got a fairly clean CPU area as we see from most motherboards these days. We can also see a clean heatsink setup around the CPU area.

Moving over to the I/O panel you can see we start off with two USB 3.0 ports that are native to the Z77 Express chipset along with a combo PS2 port. Next to that we've got VGA, DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort for video outs alongside a clear CMOS button.

Moving over again we've got two USB 2.0 ports, FireWire and a combo USB / eSATA port. Gigabit LAN is provided via the Broadcom BCM57781 controller and two more USB 3.0 ports are provided via the Etron EJ168A controller. Finally we finish off with the audio side of things which consist of an optical out and five auxiliary jacks running off the Realtek ALC898 codec.