New ASRock motherboard with AMD 770 chipset

ASRock comes with a new motherboard, based on AMD's 770 chipset and the SB700 southbridge. According to ASRock, the board, named A770 Crossfire, has more features and better performance than other motherboards with this chipset. It's compatible with AMD's latest Phenom 9950 quadcore processor with a TDP of 140 Watt, and is able to have the two PCI-Express 2.0 slots run in 8x/8x as well, while other motherboards of this chipset are only able to place it in the less fortunate 16x/4x configuration. The board has four DDR2 slots which can house up to 8 GB of 800MHz memory.

Image source: ASRock

Thanks to the use of the SB700 southbridge, the board features six SATA and one eSATA port. There's also three PCI slots and one PCI-E 1x slot present. Apart from the SATA connectors there's also an IDE and a floppy. 

On the I/O panel on the backside of the board there are six USB 2.0 ports as well as the PS/2 and 7.1 audio connectors. There's also a Gigabit LAN port which is connected through PCI-Express and digital audioconnectors (both optical as coaxial). To configure the PCI-Express slots in a different matter, the switchcard on the motherboard hsa to be flipped, not the most user friendly method of doing things, but certainly a great option to keep prices low.

The board also features an Intelligent Energy Saver to keep the power consumption as low as possible. From internal benchmarks at ASRock, a crossfire setup with two HD4850 cards gives better performance than nVidia's GTX 260. There's no information known on prices and availability yet, but don't expect it to take long before this board hits the shelves. 

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