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The Board

Before talking about the board, let's see what else comes in the retail package.

• Manual
• Quick Setup Guide
• Driver CD
• 4 SATA2 cables
• IDE cable
• floppy cable
• back IO panel
• case sticker

That's it.

The bundle is a little light, I'd have liked to see two more SATA2 cables as well as a couple of Molex-to-SATA2 power cables; and I/O slot covers for the additional FireWire and USB ports would also have been welcome.

As you can see below, the northbridge and the VRM's are cooled by heatpipes and heatsinks, and there are a couple of more cooling plates on the bottom of the motherboard.

I like how the slots are laid out - even if you use two double-slot cooler GPU's, you'll still have two PCIe 1x and one PCI slot usable.

Here's a closer look at the CPU socket - note the silk screening on the motherboard proclaiming HT3.0 support.

Dual memory channels are supported, of course, however watch out for using large third party heatsinks and memory with oversize heatsinks - the two are not compatible with at least the uppermost yellow slot.

Here you can see six of the SATA2 ports - there are two more on the back I/O panel. I wish the purple SATA ports were closer to the four orange ones.

Here's the back IO panel

Nice...

• PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports
• serial port
• SP/DIFF and optical out
• four and six pin FireWire
• Gigabit Ethernet
• six USB 2.0 ports
• two eSATA ports
• and six analog audio ports