Asrock Z690 Extreme

The CPU socket is an important factor in selecting the board; the CPU board must be exactly compatible with the CPU that you want to install with the board. Irrespective of the fact that the CPU fits the socket of the motherboard also the support of this CPU has to be taken into account. For verifying which CPUs are supported by the selected motherboard you should visit the website of the manufacturer of the motherboard, find the CPU support section of the relevant motherboard and verify that the specification of this particular board provides for the support of the CPU that you have selected.

The chip bus is the most important criterion of selecting the motherboard (the system logic chips or the voltage transformers). The chip bus determines the CPUs, memory ports and other parameters that are supported by the motherboard.

Each chipset is directly related to a certain CPU platform which are divided based upon the family of CPUs or the connection point of the CPU.

For verifying which chip bus is suitable for your CPU, etc. you should ask our managers.

The physical size of the motherboard. TopPC.fi offers ATX (full size board), mATX (micro ATX) (a board of reduced size) and miniATX size motherboards. Within the housing of an ATX size computer it is possible to place both ATX and mATX motherboard, however, in the mATX housing it is not possible to place an ATX board.

The ATX board has at least 3 memory slots and at least 5 local slots PCI, which means that a well functioning powerful computer can be built on this board. However, a home or office computer does not need this high number of slots, therefore also microATX will be suitable.

The connector of the power supply unit of the motherboard is the power source socket which are currently of ATX and ATX2.0 standard. ATX is an older standard with a 20pin connector (20 "pins"), and ATX2.0 has 4 additional pins (20+4). The motherboards of ATX standard can operate with a ATX2.0 power supply unit (PSU), however the mother board of ATX2.0 standard requires an ATX2.0 power supply unit.

Form-factor is rather a recommendation. However, prior to buying a mother board you should verify the compatibility of the housing size to the motherboard size and its power supply connector.

The number of available memory slots indicates the number of memory modules (plates) that can be installed in the motherboard.

The RAM bus determines what type of RAM is supported by the relevant motherboard.

The bus marking contains the memory type DDRII or DDRIII as well as the maximum memory clock frequency that is supported by the mother board. The type of memory is the most important index, memories of different types are physically different, therefore DDRIII memory cannot be connected to the mother board that supports DDRII memory (except the cases when the motherboard supports both types of memory). However the motherboard that support 800Mhz DDRII memory can work with the memory speeds of DDII667 and DDRII533. The mother board with the memory bus speed below the speed of the memory module will be able to operate as fast as the specified bus speed only, i.e. if the memory bus of the motherboard is DDRII667 and the memory DDRII800 is installed it will operate with the speed of DDRII667.

VGA port or the video card plug. The VGA port must comply with the specification of the video card port you have selected. Older video cards have an AGP port, new cards are manufacturer with a PCI-EXPRESS (PCI-X) port.AGP and PCI-Xpress video cards are not mutually compatible. Prior to buying the motherboard you should verify the compliance of the video card port of both the motherboard and the video card.

The parameter that determines whether a video card has been integrated with the motherboard. An integrated video card is suitable for working with the office software, Internet, watching films and playing simple games. If you wish to use graphics applications, play 3D games and watch 3D animations you would need an additional video card.

An integrated video card uses a fraction of the memory included in the mother board, therefore, if your motherboard has 1Gb memory and in the settings of the video card of the mother board it is stated that it takes 256mb the operating system will display the available memory volume of approximately 700 Mb.
Prior to buying a motherboard with a built-in video card you should verify whether it has an additional video card port for further upgrades if these are required

PCI ports present the most popular way of supplementing the computer functions with additional cards (sound, network, communications, video surveillance, etc.). Newer boards, thanks to the PCI-Express standard, have a small number of PCI extension ports, therefore, prior to buying the motherboard you should verify if the number of PCI ports allows the connection of all the PCI cards you need.