14 DAY TRIAL // Last week, ECS was the first to announce a new AM3 motherboard, coming to support the upcoming range of Phenom II processors, due to be released by Advanced Micro in early 2009. It now appears that yet another motherboard maker is also ready with its AM3 mobo, more specifically ASRock. The company's M3A790GXH/128M AM3 mainboard has just been pictured and leaked on the Internet, a fact that can only indicate that the product could be released in the upcoming weeks.
The guys over at ocworkbench.com have just posted a first image of the said mobo. The article also includes details on the board's technical specifications and even a product picture, for a better understanding of what you should expect from the upcoming product.
As with the ECS mobo, this ASRock desktop platform has been designed on AMD's 790GX and SB750 desktop chipset combo. The Phenom II-ready AM3 socket is also capable of providing support for AMD's earlier released processors, designed to work on AM2 and AM2+ motherboards. Thanks to the device's chipsets, users will be able to take advantage of AMD's Hyper-Transport 3.0 technology, up to 16GB of DDR3 1333 RAM memory, which can be set up to work in dual-channel mode.
On the graphics side, the board can provide its users with three PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots that will be capably used in a multi-GPU setup, employing ATI's CrossFireX technology. Furthermore, the product boasts a Radeon HD 3300 graphics core with support for DirectX 10, Pixel Shader 4.0, and a maximum shared memory of 512MB. This integrated GPU can be used in a Hybrid CrossFireX setup, which will allow users to boost their system's graphics performance by just adding a new graphics card.
Additional features include the six SATA II 3.0 Gb/s connectors with support for RAID (RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 10, and JBOD), one eSATA 3.0 Gb/s port, and Gigabit Ethernet connector. There's also an integrated 128MB side port memory for the board's integrated GPU.