ASRock reveals some of its Computex announcements

So far ECS is the only motherboard manufacturer to officially reveal some of its upcoming products for Computex, while pretty much everything else has been leaks. However, now ASRock has launched its Computex portal and were looking at a pretty interesting selection of new products being showcased.

First up we have the A75 Extreme6, ASRocks top-of-the-range AMD FM1 motherboard with the A75 chipset. This is so far the most feature rich A75 board weve seen and even at that, it looks like a fairly bare PCB. Were a little bit curious about ASRocks slot layout, as the board has no less than three x16 PCI Express slots. As far as we were aware support for CrossFire or SLI wasnt part of the A75 chipset, but theres no mistaking in the fact that ASRock has fitted lane switches on the board indicating that the primary and secondary slots are sharing bandwidth and ASRock is claiming quad CrossFireX support. The third slot is most likely a x4 slot, as the board only has a single x1 PCI Express and very few other PCI Express devices. There are also three PCI slots of which at least one will be usable even if two dual slot graphics cards are fitted.

The A75 Extreme6 has a total of eight SATA 6Gbps ports, six native to the chipset and two via a third party controller, although were not sure which controller this is. As were looking at native USB 3.0 support there are not third party USB 3.0 host controllers on this board, but were still looking at two rear ports and a pin-header around the front for a further two ports. The board also has pin headers for what appears to be six USB 2.0 ports and a FireWire port. The power regulation circuitry looks like a 8+2 phase design which is the most advanced weve seen so far for the FM1 platform.

Were not entirely sure about the rear I/O configuration, but wed guess on a single PS/2 port, four USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, a FireWire port, an eSATA port, 7.1-channel audio with optical S/PDIF out, Gigabit Ethernet and a DVI, HDMI and D-sub connector from what we can see, as well as a clear CMOS button. Overall this looks like a really decent board and it further shows how much ASRock has changed over the past two years and that the company is becoming a major player in the motherboard market space.