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The Board

Asus includes a fairly large pile of stuff with the M3N-HT Deluxe:

• Motherboard Manual
• Driver CD
• SLI connectors
• USB/Firewire slot cover
• six SATA2 cables and SATA2 power cable adapter
• those quick jumper connect blocks
• IDE cable & floppy cable
• HDMI to DVI adapter
• chipset cooler fan
• memory heat pipes

Now I will freely admit that I did not even try the memory heat pipes. No point to it, as you will read later in the review, the memory timing options are ... limited.

The motherboard looks good, and the three GPU slots certainly look impressive - two of them are PCIe 2.0 8x slots, and one is a PCIe 16x slot, which should be enough for even rabid SLI fans. But in case you do want quad SLI, you always get two 9800GX2's if you feel so inclined. I also liked the large number of USB2 headers on the motherboard, and the firewire headers did not hurt either.

The small card you see between one of the two PCI slots and the black GPU slots is a small SSD, apparently used to store the Express Gate Linux based web browsing that comes with the board.

There appear to be plenty of solid state capacitors for smooth power.

I really like the possibility of six-way RAID 5. Let's see... six 1TB drives... 5TB RAID5 storage. Nice....

And here is the featurefull back I/O panel.... four USB2.0's, PS/2 keyboard, SP-DIFF, optical out, eSATA, analog audio, and HDMI and VGA.