H61iCafe Overview
When I first heard the name H61iCafe I honestly thought it was going to be a mATX board, but this board is a normal ATX board. Unlike many of the P67 and H67 boards, this board is less “busy” and does not have all that much to it. ASRock has gone with a black PCB design with the accents on the board being blue and white.
Starting up at the CPU socket the first thing that caught my eye was how open it was. There really is not that much surrounding it at all. This is because ASRock is using a 4 + 1 power phase design. Since this is an H61 board there really is no need for a crazy power design that you would see on other enthusiast boards. ASRock is using a 100% solid capacitor design. On thing that really struck me as odd was the placement of the 8pin CPU power connection. It is at the top of the board on the right side rather than the left like we are used to seeing.
Moving over to the memory slots you have room for 4 DIMMS with a total capacity of 16GB. Also with the H61 chipset you can only run DDR3 up to 1333 MHz so keep that in mind when purchasing your memory. At the end of the board is the 24pin power connector and a 3pin fan connector. Moving down to the bottom corner of the board you have most of your connections. There are 4 SATA 3GB/s ports (blue), 2 SATA 6GB/s ports (white), 2 internal USB 2.0 headers, front panel headers and a 4pin fan connector.
As far as expansion slots go you have one PCI-E 2.0 x16 slot (blue), two PCI-E 2.0 x1 slots, and 2 PCI slots. Looking at connections on the board from left to right you have 2 USB 2.0, PS/2 keyboard port, VGA, DVI, HDMI, 2 USB 3.0, ethernet, 2 more USB 2.0 and your audio ports with optical out. The HDMI is port is a full-sized HDMI connection that supports HDMI 1.4a.
