14 DAY TRIAL // ASRock seems to have gained a special liking for the newest generations of storage interfaces. Around the beginning of the month, it came out and unveiled a motherboard with four SATA 6.0Gbps ports. Now, the same company has decided to make a similar foray into the USB 3.0 field, only with two mainboards instead of just one. Said newcomers will be part of the Deluxe4 series and they are, supposedly, the first boards with front USB 3.0.
The motherboards that have been equipped with USB 3.0 connectivity so far usually had only two USB ports, both of which were on the back panel. ASRock thought it would take things up a notch, so it added a detachable front panel that brings another two to the equation. This should allow enthusiasts to easily make the best of their SuperSpeed-ready external storage devices.
The rest of the feature set of the boards is nothing to be frowned upon. Both have support for AM3 processors, including the AMD Phenom II X6 6-core line. They also boast four DDR3 memory slots, eSATA connectivity, 7.1 channel audio and a debug LED. Furthermore, their maker's proprietary technology ASRock UCC (unlock CPU core) is supported, as is ATI CrossFireX, for multi-GPU setups. Needless to say, a fair number of SATA 6.0 Gbps ports are present as well, namely eight on the 890FX and five on the 890GX.
The list of specifications was published by OCWorkbench. The USB 3.0 ports are handled by an NEC controller chip, whereas the extra three SATA 3 ports on the higher-end model are supported by means of a Marvell controller (five are natively supported by the chipset). Finally, the 890GX Deluxe4 obviously comes with the Radeon HD 4290 integrated graphics. Both products should reach stores within the next few weeks, but their prices are still unknown.