ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6 Motherboard

While we've got a dark PCB it's not a black one like we saw from the GIGABYTE FM2 offering. We've got those typical black, silver and gold highlights that we're used to seeing on Extreme based motherboards from ASRock.

Moving in closer to the motherboard we can see what's going on with the expansion slot side of things. We've got a total of two older legacy PCI slots, two PCIe x1 slots and three PCIe x16 slots which run in at x16 or x8 / x8 if you're running a CrossFire setup. The final PCIe x16 slot is wired at only x4.

Moving across the bottom of the board we can see all the normal culprits here with COM1 header, HD Audio header, multiple USB 2.0 headers, fan header along with both a power and reset button also being present. Above the power and reset button you can also see an LED debug reader that makes solving any boot issues easier.

Turning the corner we can see a total of seven SATA III ports and not a whole lot else. As we move further up the board you can see four DDR3 DIMM slots supporting memory from 800MHz DDR up to 2600MHz+ DDR via overclocking. We've also got the main 24-pin ATX power connector here and to the left of that you can see a USB 3.0 header.

Moving around to the CPU area side of things you can see the main 8-pin CPU power connector and moving back a little we get an idea of what's going on with the actual socket area. Like most modern motherboards these days it's pretty clean looking and you can see the gold caps present that are promoted on the box. You can also see a heatsink to the left of the socket area with the Extreme labeling present.

Finally we finish off with the I/O side of things and you can see the PS/2 combo port on the left along with four USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports and an eSATA III connector. Video connectivity comes in the form of VGA, DVI-D, HDMI and DisplayPort while we've also got a clear CMOS button present. Finally we finish off with Gigabit networking via the Realtek RTL8111E controller, five auxiliary ports and an optical out all running off the Realtek ALC898.