The Motherboard

Looking straight on, you can get a good idea of exactly what we've got on our hands without the need to really move in much. Being based on the mATX platform it of course comes in at 24.4cm x 24.4cm verse the 30.5cm x 21.1cm setup that's present on the Pro3 model.

The smaller size means that the biggest impact to extras is the amount of expansion ports we have. Having a closer look, you can see we've got an older legacy PCI port, two PCI-E 1x and a single PCI-E 16x. For a lot of people, though, this will be more than enough expansion as you have the ability to install a good video card and something in the second PCI-E 1x slot; maybe a TV Tuner, Sound Card or something else along those lines.

Moving across to the bottom of the board, we can begin to get a closer look at what's going on. Across here we've got our HD Audio header, COM1, Floppy drive connector, printer port header, IR module header, three USB 2.0 headers and our system panel header.

Above our system header you can see we've got three SATA2 ports while if we move a little further up we've got two white SATA3 ports next to a fan header. All these SATA ports run off the Z68 chipset; no other controller is installed.

As we move up to the top right corner of the board, you can see next to our SATA3 ports we've got our main 24-Pin ATX power connector and above that we've got our four RAM slots. Here we've got support for up to 32GB of DDR3 RAM at 1066/1333/1600/1866/2133MHz DDR.