ASRock A780GMH/128M Motherboard Review :: Layout

CPU Socket

CPU Socket area

Memory

Rear of PCB

The ASRock board is on a mini-ATX form factor, meaning it will fit on any ATX or mini-ATX form factor case. The CPU Socket area is pretty clear, allowing most after-market CPU coolers to be installed on this board. The Northbridge and Southbridge are each cooled by a heatsink. The lack of a fan on the chips is due to the 55 nanometer process requiring less power and generating less heat than the 90 nanometer chips used before.

The memory controller was moved to the CPU with the introduction of the Athlon 64 from the Southbridge on earlier CPUs. The A780GMH/128M motherboard has four DIMM slots for up to 16GB of dual-channel DDR2 memory. The memory speed supported is dependent on the CPU. AM3/AM2+ CPUs support DDR2-1067MHz. AM2 CPUs support DDR2 800/667MHz. Of course the AM3 CPUs also support DDR3 memory but that is not present on this board.

Expansion slots

SB710

Realtek RTL8110S PHY

Capacitors

ASRock includes a single PCI Express Generation 2.0 x16 slot, a PCI Express x1 slot, and two PCI slots for legacy add-in cards. The PCI Express x16 slot allows the end-user to install a PCI Express video card like the ATI Radeon HD 4870 or HD 4870 X2 if they so desire. This also allows the end-user to install a HD 3450 card to provide CrossfireX capability. This allows the integrated graphics to work with the HD 3450 to improve performance.

4 SATA ports

2 SATA ports

IDE

FDD

The SB710 chip on the board differs from the SB750 chip on the 790GX motherboards in only a couple of ways. The SB750 brings support for RAID 5 on the AMD platform, while the 710 on this board does not support RAID 5 at all. There are six SATA 3Gb/s ports on the board which is what the chip supports. One notable feature that the SB710 inherits from the SB750 is the ability to use the AMD OverDrive utility and AMD Advanced Clock Calibration. An IDE port and a FDD port round out the drive support.]

24-pin power

4-pin power

USB Headers

FP IO and Speaker headers

The 24-pin power connector is on the bottom part of the motherboard under the memory slots. The 4-pin power connector is on the top of the board above the CPU Socket. The board has the CPU Fan connector and two fan headers for external fans. There are three USB 2.0 headers on the board, bringing the total on the board to 10 with the rear panel IO taken into account. ASRock has the FP IO headers next to the USB headers on this board.

Via VT1708S

Winbond

Circuitry

Capacitors

Onboard audio on the board is provided by a Via VT1708B CODEC. This CODEC is part of Via's Vinyl line of audio chips. It is fully compliant with the Intel High Definition Audio standard Revision 1.0. Onboard audio has taken over for discrete audio in the market. This features four Stereo DAC pairs supporting 48K/96K/192K/44.1K/88.2KHz Sample rate, two Stereo ADCs with 44.1K/48K/96K/192K/44.1K/88.2KHz sample rate a 16/24-bit SPDIF TX and RX.

Rear IO

The rear IO on the board consists of a HDMI port, a VGA port and a DVI-D port. One thing about the DVI-D port that should be noted is that you can't insert a DVI-I connector due to the missing holes for the 4 pins of that connector. The HDMI port and VGA port provide the maximum monitor support on the market today from an integrated graphics chipset. A PS/2 mouse and PS/2 Keyboard port, S/PDIF Out, Gigabit LAN port, four USB 2.0 ports and six audio ports for the onboard sound round out the rear IO.