Heise visited ASRock at CeBIT and got to see two LGA1150 motherboards for Intel's Haswell processor: the entry-level B85M (left) and the Z87-Extreme6 (right). Both motherboards are prototypes, their component/PCB color schemes and hearsinks haven't been finalized yet.
Moving on, the Z87-Extreme6 is much better equipped, and could lead ASRock's first wave of LGA1150 motherboards. It uses a 10-phase VRM to power the CPU, four DDR3 DIMM slots, three PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots likely capable of x16/NC/NC or x8/x8/NC or x8/x4/x4; a PCI-Express 2.0 x1, an mPCIe, and two legacy PCI slots. The board features a total of eight internal SATA 6 Gb/s ports (six from the Z87 chipset, two by a third-party controller); and four USB 3.0 ports. Connectivity appears to include 8-channel HD audio, gigabit Ethernet, DVI, HDMI, and D-Sub display outputs. It's interesting to note on both ASRock boards that the PCH silicon appears smaller than what we're used to seeing on older 7-series chipset. Perhaps Intel finally got around to building PCH silicon on smaller silicon fab processes, such as 45 nm.
