Asrock 890gx Extreme 3 Views

General Goods

Last week, we presented the ASRock 880G Extreme3 mainboard. Today, we take a look at the bigger brother the 890GX Extreme3 mainboard. Some what alike, both board features very similar specifications and functionalities. In fact, we arenn’t able to find much difference between the two other than the 890GX Extreme3 uses the AMD 890GX north bridge which clocks itm’s internal GPU at 700MHz instead of 560MHz on the 880G Extreme3.

The 890GX Extreme3 has a very complete feature set. It has ASRock DuraCap (2.5 x longer life time), 100% Japan-made high-quality Conductive Polymer Capacitors with Advanced V8 + 2 Power Phase Design which can supports CPU up to 140W. This board also supports the Phenom II X6 6 core processor. The most interesting would be the UCC which allows it to unlock the hidden cores e.g. the Phenom II X4 960T, enabling the two hidden cores and a‘converte’ it into a 6 core processor.

AMD chipsets traditionally offer many PCI Express lanes -- enough for a standard amount of normal graphics slots plus a slot with fewer lanes. Even then some lanes will remain. And ASRock makes sure all of those lanes are used. For this reason, ASRock 890GX Extreme3 has two graphics slots which can automatically switch to the x8+x8 mode, if you install two graphics cards. It also has the third slot with 4 lanes. It's interesting that even the latter can accomodate a dual-slot graphics card without blocking access to any peripheral ports. If you only have one graphics card, you should install it into the first graphics slot, because it's the only one with 16 PCI Express lanes. In all other aspects, the motherboard is simple. It offers chipset functionality plus USB 3.0 and FireWire. This is typical for most motherboards based on this chipset that we have reviewed. Note that ASRock decided to go without an IDE port. This will be a disadvantage, if you still have legacy drives.

Original features include the CMOS reset button. As for the eSATA 3Gbps port on the backpanel, ASRock tells us that it uses one of the chipset ports (ASRock 890GX Extreme3 has all six SATA 6Gbps ports, but lacks an additional SATA 3Gbps controller). But then why does that port only provides 3Gbps bandwidth instead of 6Gbps? ASRock says it's located too far from the Southbridge, so the connecting lane is too long hence throughput limitations. Anyway, the company provides a separate eSATA 6Gbps bracket you can use with one of the remaining onboard SATA ports.