We have reviewed a number of AMD Spider platform mainboards ranging from AMD 780G boards to the 790FX to 790X and the latest 790GX boards. Today, we take a look at the other little brother of 790FX discrete chipset, the AMD 770.

As you are probably aware, the AMD 770 chipset was released earlier this year together with 790X and 790FX. So, why is it that ASRock interested in making a AMD 770 solution ? If you look at this page on AMD website, you would have noticed that the AMD 770 chipset is just a scaled down version of the 790X chipset. The AMD 770 does not support GPU-Plex, Quad PCIe blocks and CrossFireX.

Although not officially supported, ASRock has found a way to enable CrossFire X and XpressRoute on the AMD 770 chipset. They found GOLD in it. That is why ASRock comes out with this board using the entry level AMD 770+SB700 chipsets that can do whatever the expensive boards promises.

Based on the AMD 770+SB700 chipset, this board supports all series of Phenom, X2 CPUs including the 140W processors. So, rest assured that you do not need to change the board with any upcoming power hungry processors.

It Supports Dual Channel DDR2 1066 with AM2+ CPU , and DDR2 800/667/533 with AM2 CPU, with 4 DIMM slots, maximum capacity up to 8GB. It supports ATI™ CrossFireX™ with 2 x PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots (green @ x16 mode, blue @ x8 mode) in Dual 8x mode using a switch peddle card.

The board comes with 6 x SATAII 3.0 Gb/s connectors, support RAID (RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1, RAID 10, and JBOD), NCQ, AHCI and "Hot Plug" functions and 1 x eSATAII 3.0 Gb/s connector. On board is a PCIE Gigabit LAN 10/100/1000 Mb/s and 1 x WiFi/E header.

The board has  Realtek 7.1 CH Windows® Vista™ Premium Level HD Audio (ALC888 Audio Codec) and is Windows® Vista™ Premium 2008 Logo Ready

The back panel comes with 1 x Coaxial SPDIF Out Port, 1 x Optical SPDIF Out Port, 1 x eSATAII Port, 6 ready-to-use USB

For overclockers, there is software ASRock OC Tuner. You could also adjust voltage, frequency controls from the BIOS. For energy savings, there is Intelligent Energy Saver that comes to the rescue.

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