There's no shortage of next-generation interfaces on ASRock's latest motherboards. Earlier this month the company unveiled a new high-end socket LGA1156 motherboard based on the Intel P55 chipset, the P55 Extreme4, carrying as many as four SATA 6 Gb/s ports and four USB 3.0 ports (a pair on the rear panel and the others available on the front or back via internal headers). ASRock touted it as the world's first motherboard supporting front USB 3.0 connectivity, and now they are ready to announce two more: the 890FX-Deluxe4 and 890GX-Extreme4.
As the names suggest, these motherboards will be based on the AMD 890FX and AMD 890GX chipsets, respectively, supporting socket AM3 processors. Like their P55-based siblings, they also support up to four USB 3.0 ports, but since the AMD SB850 southbridge already includes a SATA 6 Gb/s RAID controller, the total number of such ports has been bumped – there are five natively supported on the 890GX and eight on the 890FX via an additional Marvell controller.
The 890GX Deluxe4 comes with Radeon HD 4290 integrated graphics, but other than that and the total number of SATA 6 Gb/s ports, both products are quite similar in terms of layout and features. They feature a 10-phase CPU VRM design, support ASRock UCC and Turbo UCC to unlock cores and turbo-boost them, have four memory slots supporting up to DDR3-1866 MHz via overclocking, eSATA connectivity, 7.1 channel audio, gigabit Ethernet, Firewire, and CrossFireX for multi-GPU setups. Prices for both products are still unknown, but they'll supposedly start shipping in a few weeks.