The Motherboard

The board itself for a desktop board is extremely small. It uses only the original ATX layout; it will fit into even the tightest of ATX cases as it is only one spacer wide. In terms of layout things are done well. The 24-pin power connector along with the IDE ports is located behind the DIMM sockets. That's right; this board only comes with two DDR-2 memory slots. The 4-pin power connector is located at the top left of the board behind the PS/2 tower.

The CPU area is very neat and clean, installing large aftermarket heatsinks will be no problem here. The CPU is givens a 3 phase digital voltage regulation system to provide stable power.

The rear I/O ports are pretty standard for this kind of board. You will note there is a missing port near the serial port. This PCB is also used for the K8M890 that has integrated graphics, so this is where the VGA port sits.

Expansions slots are plentiful. You get a standard PCI Express x16 slot for graphics a graphics card, a couple PCI Express x1 slots for standard expansion and three PCI slots for legacy support.

Lastly we come to the extended features that aren't supported directly by the chipset. Since VIA doesn't have an Integrated Gigabit MAC on its Southbridges like Intel, it relies on external controllers for this. A Realtek Gigabit PCI Express controller chip handles the LAN abilities of this board.