ASRock H55DE3 Motherboard Review :: Board Layout

Board

8-pin power

CPU Socket

Back of board

Starting with the upper right corner, the board has an 8-pin power header for whose power supplies that have that connector. The board itself is a black color with 4+1 Power phase circuitry. The CPU Fan is next on the board of the 4-pin variety. The CPU area is completely devoid of obstacles allowing the installation of any CPU cooler in that area.

DIMM Sockets

H55 chipset

Chassis fan

24-pin power

Below the CPU area are four DIMM slots. This board has support for LGA-1156 CPUs meaning it supports up to 16GB of DDR3-1333MHz memory natively in dual channel mode via the CPU as the CPU contains the memory controller. The bottom of the board starts off with capacitors and the 24-pin power connector. There is a 3-pin Chassis Fan header next to that.

SATA ports

Winbond

USB

TPM and Front Panel

The board has four SATA ports placed at the left corner of the board. This placement is ideal as it doesn’t block two slot video cards from being installed. To the left of the SATA ports are three USB headers. The Front Panel connections are next, followed by the Infrared header and COM1 headers. The last thing on this board is the HD Audio headers.

capacitors

Expansion

COM1

ASMedia chip

Expansion on the board consists of two PCI Express x1 slots, two PCI Express x16 slots and two PCI slots. The H55 chipset has a grand total of 16 PCI Express lanes available to it meaning that using 4 lanes are taken from the H55 chipset. When two video cards are installed the lanes are split up into x16, x 4 combinations on this board. There is plenty of spacing between the two graphics card slots to install two slot video cards like the HD 5970.

VIA VT1718S

4+1 Power Phase circuitry

ICS

Realtek RTL8111DL

Creative Labs is well known for their Audigy series of sound cards. One of the issues with them right now is that sales of add-in sound cards are dismal due to the onboard sound being “good enough” for most people. They developed a program called the Audigy X-Fi software suite which when paired with a compatible HD CODEC provides support for EAX 4.0 effects in games. The Via VT7108 CODEC is compatible and when paired with the X-Fi software suite you almost have a CL sound card.

ST chip

HD Audio

Rear I/O

The rear I/O on the board consists of a single port for a PS/2 device whether mouse or keyboard, four USB 2.0 ports, two combination USB/e-SATA ports that are powered, an HDMI port, a VGA port and a DVI-D port. There are also six jacks and ports for the onboard audio solution and a single RJ-45 jack for the onboard Gigabit LAN. This board is fully outfitted for those having a HDTV with HDMI output and has enough USB ports to fit the bill.