ASRock Z77 Pro3 Motherboard

Moving onto the board you can see straight away it's probably not going to be winning any beauty contests. We've got that very typical brown PCB that we see on cheaper options and black connectors throughout the motherboard. Let's move in a little closer, though, and see just exactly what we're dealing with here.

Moving closer to the connectivity side of things you can see we've got two Legacy PCI slots, a single PCIe x1 and two PCIe x16 slots with the second one running only at PCIe 4x making it probably not the best option if you're looking at going down the SLI / CrossFire path.

Moving to the bottom of the board you can see we lose any color coding to no doubt keep costs down and starting from the left we've got a HD Audio header followed by a COM 1, two USB 2.0 headers, fan header, our main front panel header and on the right a separate header for your computer speaker.

Turning the corner you can see we've got four SATA connectors. These are all SATA II; fortunately we've got a couple of extra SATA connectors a little further up which we'll look at just below.

Heading up north we can see on the far right we've got two grey SATA ports which are fortunately SATA III. Next to that you can see the USB 3.0 header, main 24-pin ATX power connector and a fan header. On the RAM side of things you can see we've got four slots present 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 connector and a pair of fan headers while moving back a bit we get a better look at the CPU area which is pretty clean like most these days. We've got a heatsink that sits towards the top and we lack the fancy gold capacitors of the higher end ASRock options, but everything looks fairly clean and standard.

Moving to 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.