ASRock 775Dual-VSTA Motherboard Review

Layout

The ASRock has a pretty good layout considering what kind of things it can do.

Here you can see the board being prepped for a test fit of a Thermaltake Big Typhoon heatsink. There is plenty of room around the socket to fit larger coolers like the Big Typhoon with no problem.

In this photo the brown slot is the AGP 8x slot, the purple being PCI-E. There are 4 PCI slots which gives you plenty of space to add in a couple of TV Tuners and a discreet sound card if you like. Personally I feel the Realtek 888 7.1 HD Audio on this board is excellent. The only downside to the sound is no optical or coax out which I’m sure was done to keep down costs. Note that the floppy connector is below the last PCI slot. If you require a floppy this is poor location, but there is very little practical use for floppies these days.

Finally here is a shot of the memory slots. The blue slots are DDRI which means that the yellow slots are for DDRII.