More Pictures :

Moving onto the rear panel. Like usual : 3 ways of connecting your monitor to the ATI 4290 IGP via either D-Sub, DVI-D and HDMI connections. ASrock still provides a PS2 connector (thank God for that) , a rear Clear Cmos switch is getting more and more common.

4 USB2.0 ports and a Firewire 1394 port. One eSATA2 connector. Just below the 1000Mb/s LAN port ( RJ45 type) there are two USB3.0 ports to hook up eg your fast external UDB3.0 drives. The NEC 720200 chip is implemented to deliver the USB3.0 power (also backwards compatible with older and slower devices).

The beefy designed heat pipe design is without many bells and whistles, but keeps everything pretty cool.



Another close up of the back panel. The 7.1 Channel audio card jacks are hooked up to a VIA VT2020 Audio chip. Also provided is an optical SPDIF out port



128Mb of fast DDR3 1333 sideport memory aids the 4290 to deliver respectable multimedia performance



The 4290 supports Directx10.1, full Blue Ray/HD playback. Max 512 memory can be shared ( UMA ) via the bios to enhance performance




The heatsink made pretty good contact with the IGP die, strange enough there is no thermal pad for the PWMs



Three PCI-E 2.0 X16 slots are foreseen on the PCB. The the blue ones are for either single 16X operations, when using 2 cards it drops down to dual x8 mode. The lower white PCI-E 2.0 slot is 4X mode only. For the rest, ASrock put 3 PCI slots and a tiny PCI 2.0 X1 slot to fullfill all your needs for add on cards. USB connectivity is warranted by 4 extra headers on the bottom of the PCB



6 S-ATA3.0 6Gb/s connectors for maximum hard drive performance. On the left you can also see the Dbug LED. Which makes debugging childs play. These extras give a good idea this board is more than just another ASrock budget release. Don't worry about the tiny SouthBridge heatsink, it get's barely warm



Final details are the power and Reset buttons. Together with the CLRCmos button on the rear panel the ASrock seems like a benchers dream