ASRock 870 Extreme3 motherboard

ASRock send over some details of its upcoming 870 Extreme3, it's based on the AMD 870 chipset and supports the upcoming Phenom II X6 six-core processors.

The 870 Extreme3 is built with the AMD 870 northbridge chipset and the SB850 southbridge. It supports AM3 CPUs with a maximum thermal design power (TDP) of 140W, has four DDR3-1800 memory slots (for up to a total of 16GB), a 5-phase power, two PCI Express x16 slots (with CoressFireX capabilities) and an eSATA connector, for use with fast external storage units. In addition, as it is the case with many of the company's boards, the 870 Extreme3 comes with the UCC (Unlock CPU Core) technology, which activates disabled cores on AMD dual-core and triple-core CPUs.

As most end-users probably know, the 8 Series of chipsets from AMD has native support for the next-generation storage interface known as SATA 6.0Gbps. Unfortunately, the Sunnyvale, California-based company can't say the same for USB 3.0.

Fortunately, however, ASRock, like some of its rivals, took matters into its own hands and, through the use of an NEC MPD720200 controller, was able to implement a couple of USB 3.0 ports for use with the various flash drives, hard drives and SSDs designed for the new standard. Other specifications of the device include 7.1 channel audio, Gigabit Ethernet, a debug LED, a FireWire Port and Power, Reset and Clear CMOS buttons.