14 DAY TRIAL // By now, almost all the major motherboard manufacturers have showcased their Intel Z68 powered solutions at the CeBIT 2011 fair, so ASRock couldn't miss this opportunity to present to the world its upcoming Z68 Extreme4 board.
Just as Asus and MSI did with their Z68 boards, ASRock has also decided to reuse one of their P67 motherboard PCB's for the Z68 Extreme4, more precisely that of the ASRock P67 Extreme4.
As a result, the two boards are nearly identical except for the chipset used, and they both feature 8-phase power, four 6Gbps and four 3Gbps SATA ports, quad DIMM sockets, on-board power, reset and clear CMOS buttons, a BIOS debug LCD as well as four USB 2.0 ports, two routed to the back of the mainboard and two available via a header.
Furthermore, the Z68 Extreme4 also packs three PCI Express x16 slots, dual PCI-E x1 slots as well as a pair of regular PCI slots.
Of the three PCI Express x16 slots available, only the first one works in x16 mode, the second running in x8 mode while the third has only four PCI-E lanes routed to it.
The board is compatible with AMD's CrossFireX technology as well as with Nvidia SLI and supports 7.1 channel sound via a Realtek ALC892 audio codec which features THX TruStudio Pro certification.
Moving to the rear I/O panel, we find that ASRock's motherboard packs a wide assortment of video outputs, including D-Sub, DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort, four USB 2.0 ports, dual USB 3.0 ports, FireWire, eSATA and Ethernet connectivity as well as digital and analog audio inputs and outputs.
A Clear CMOS button is also present for quickly clearing the BIOS after a failed overclocking attempt.
Right now, no details regarding the board's availability were made public, but the Z68 chipset is expected to be released in the first week of May. (via ComputerBase)
