ASRock X58 SuperComputer Motherboard

First Look and Board Layout:

The ASRock X58 SuperComputer motherboard is packaged in a nice retail style box with holographic images and a carbon fiber background pattern. The front of the box shows a few of the features of the board as well as the name and large X58 logo. It sports both the ATI Crossfire and NVIDIA SLI logos. The box also shows that the motherboard supports four (4) double-wide spaced x16 PCIe slots. The rear of the box shows another of this boards major features; it supports 3 x NVIDIA Tesla cards in conjunction with a NVIDIA Quadro card for CUDA supercomputing projects. It also features a full color picture of the board detailing specific features.

Upon opening the box, you see all of the included accessories. There is the I/O panel for the motherboard, six SATA cables, two molex-to-SATA power cables, a floppy cable, an IDE cable, SLI and crossfire bridges, and the drivers CD and manual. The board itself is protected in an anti-static bag. ASRock has put a few stickers on the board to help when building the computer if you're not the type to read the manual.

The motherboard is a black PCB with quite a few bright colored slots, and is standard full size ATX form factor. At the top left of the board the 8-pin power connector is right next to the VREG heatpipe cooler. To the right of this is the CPU Socket. The area surrounding the CPU socket features all low-profile solid state capacitors, thus making mounting large heatsinks a non-issue. There are six (6) DDR3 triple-channel memory slots in alternating blue and white colors to designate their respective channels. To the right of the memory slots is the 24 pin ATX connector. Below the ATX connector are the power, reset, HDD led, and power led pins. The firewire and USB pin headers are also up there. The reasoning for this non-standard mounting is because if you are filling the four PCI-E slots with dual slot cards then you would not be able to use these headers in their normal spot on the bottom of the board.

Moving to the bottom half of the motherboard is where this board gets to show its features. There are four double spaced x16 PCIe slots. The two blue ones when populated alone will run at 16x. If the orange ones are populated as well then they all run at 8x. With the spacing of the cards you can run a great NVIDIA Tesla or ATI Quad Crossfire setup. In between each of the PCIe slots is also a regular PCI slot for legacy purposes.

Below the last PCIe slot is the HDMI SPDIF header so you can output audio if your graphics card supports it. There is also a floppy, COM1, and IR header there as well. To the right of this is a well placed CMOS jumper, I really like when these are easily accessible. The six (6) SATA ports are side facing so they can be plugged in even with a long graphics card. The lone IDE port is also mounted at 90 degrees in case you have any legacy drives to plug in.