The Motherboard

Moving out of the bundle and onto the motherboard, we see a combination that we don't see very often in the Black / White setup along with a bit of grey. I'm a big fan of the color combination ECS opt for and we've seen it before from them in other Black Series motherboards.

Moving in closer to the board, you can see we've got a fairly simple setup in terms of having just two PCIe x1 connectors and four PCIe x16 connectors that are actually in a position that makes installing four dual slot video cards possible.

The configuration is x16 / x8 / x16 / x8 from a wired point of view. If you're going to go with a two card setup you would use the two grey slots, if you want to move over to a three or four card setup, then you add the white ones into the mix and we move to a x16 / x8 / x16 or x8 / x8 / x8 / x8 setup. We can also see to the left of the top slot a Molex connector in the event you want to go with a bigger VGA setup.

Moving across the bottom of the board, you can see the normal array of headers with our audio, S/PDIF, COM 1, USB 3.0, two USB 2.0 and our main front panel connector.

Tucked up just a little back we can there's also a power and reset button present along with a LED Debug reader which always comes in handy if your system starts to head south.

Finally, we finish up with the SATA side of things and it's nice to see that we can actually make use of the 12 SATA cables included thanks to the 12 SATA ports on the board. We've got a combination of four SATA II ports in white and eight SATA III ports in grey with the controllers being the onboard Intel X79 chip and the ASMedia ASM1061 chip. You'll generally want to try and stick to the Intel ones on the right hand side for your main devices.