ASRock Z77 Extreme4 Review

👤by David Mitchelson Comments 📅25-04-12
Closer Look (Continued)

At the bottom of the motherboard – behind the SATA ports are two noteworthy features – power and reset buttons and DrDebug.

The Power and reset buttons are now becoming a popular addition and are extremely useful if you are perhaps testing the system outside of a computer chassis – it saves you having to hook up the chassis power button cables.

DrDebug meanwhile features a LED panel – this panel displays codes as you go through POST and into Windows and can be very useful at identifying potential problems. Codes displayed on this panel correspond to the User Manual and can identify problems with memory or other components.


Onboard power and reset buttons with LED debug


Over at the PCI-Express slots there are an assortment of PCI, PCI-E x1 and PCI-E x16. ASRock have chosen to include 2x PCI slots for legacy devices – the justification for this is legible. Not that many enthusiasts nowadays use legacy PCI. Further to this there are 2x PCI-E 2.0 x1 slots at the top and bottom of this area and then there are 2x PCI-E 3.0 x16 slots for graphics. The top slot is x16 whilst the bottom is x8 so if you are going to be using a single card solution it would be better to use the top slot, but if you do go with a dual card configuration then this will drop to x8 for both cards – I should also mention whilst saying this that there is support for NVIDIA SLI and AMD Crossfire (or ATI Crossfire as it says on the PCB!).


A selection of PCI and PCI-E


Lastly the rear IO. Here there is a again quite a wide selection of options. From left to right there is:

• PS2 Keyboard/Mouse
• 2x USB 3.0 ports
• VGA/DVI and HDMI display ports
• Clear CMOS button
• 2x USB 2.0 ports
• eSATA 3GB/s port
• Gigabit LAN (RJ45) port
• 2x USB 3.0 ports
• 7.1 Channel audio jacks with optical S/PDIF

With Intel’s 2nd and 3rd Generation Processors having and integrated graphics chip the Z77 chipset has video outputs to provide connectivity. Some motherboards have different combinations of ports but it’s good to see that ASRock have chosen the most popular choices.


The rear IO has a lots of options including a Clear CMOS button with LED


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