ASRock 880G Extreme3 & 890FX Deluxe3
The ASRock 890FX Deluxe3 motherboard is much like its 880G Extreme3 sibling, but it uses the higher-end 890FX Northbridge while retaining the SB850 Southbridge. This motherboard with a greater feature-set also supports AMD Vision Black, greater connectivity support, and a more elaborate heatpipe cooling solution that is actively cooled. Like the 880G motherboard, this 890FX product supports up to 16GB of dual-channel DDR3-1333/1066/800MHz RAM or DDR3-1800/1600MHz memory when in its overclocking mode.
The SB850 chipset heatsink, SATA and IDE ports, and handy power/reset switches in the bottom corner of the 890FX Deluxe3 motherboard is almost identical to that of the lower-end 880G Extreme3 motherboard. The expansion slots on this motherboard include three PCI Express 2.0 x16, two PCI Express x1, and two PCI slots. The PCI Express x16 limitations on this motherboard is that the two PCI-E x16 slots colored blue will operate with full bandwidth regardless of any other slots being used, but the single white PCI Express x16 slot is limited to PCI-E x4 bandwidth. Another feature of the 890FX Deluxe3 is another two Serial ATA connectors next to the FDD connector along the bottom edge of the PCB.
The heatpipe cooling solution found on the ASRock 890FX Deluxe3 is more elaborate than what is found with the 880G Extreme3, but with these two motherboards it is our first time seeing heatpipes make an appearance on any of ASRock's motherboards that are generally regarded as being for the budget-constrained consumer. The 890FX Deluxe3 supports the same Socket AM3 CPUs as its 880G sibling.
The rear panel I/O ports on this motherboard include PS/2 keyboard, PS/2 mouse, coaxial S/PDIF output, optical S/PDIF output, four USB 2.0 ports, four USB 3.0 ports, one eSATA 3.0 connector, one Gigabit Ethernet, one IEEE-1394 Firewire, a clear CMOS switch, and the usual HD audio analog jacks. While the 890FX Deluxe3 is a higher-end solution to the 880G Extreme3 motherboard, both were designed and built incredibly well and offer the best feature-set and capabilities of any ASRock motherboard that we have reviewed in more than a half-decade.