The Motherboard

The ROG boards from ASUS are great looking boards and this one is no different. We've got a black and red theme throughout There's nothing too crazy going on and you can see just a nice clean setup from top to bottom.

Moving closer to the board, we can start to look at the expansion slots that are on offer. We've got a single legacy PCI-Express port, single PCI-E 1x port and four PCI-E 16x ports that are all in red.

Of course, our four PCI-E 16x ports don't all run at 16x speed. With support for SLI and CrossFire you're going to want to know how to use the ports that are available. If you're using just the one card, you'll use the top one which runs at 16x. If you throw a second card into the mix you want to use the third port. This will allow both your cards to run at 16x. When using two cards the second port will run only at 1x.

If you throw a third card into the mix you'll use the top three ports and your setup from top to bottom would be 16x / 8x / 8x. At all times your forth slot will be running at 4x, but if you're opting for a multi GPU setup that takes up more than one slot, which is more than likely, you won't have a real need for the fourth PCI-E 16x slot.

Moving away from our expansion slots, we can check out the bottom of the board. On the right hand side you can see our main systems header, two fan headers and next to that two USB headers. The most stand out bit across the bottom would have to be our three buttons, though, which offer both power on / off and reset along with easy overclocking. With the press of the OC button when your system is off, it will then proceed to overclock the system itself. Just what kind of performance we achieved via this button, we'll discuss later on.

Turning the corner, you can see a total of seven SATA headers. The six pointing out are all SATA 6G ports that are controlled via the AMD SB950; the seventh port which sits by itself is also SATA 6G, but is controlled via the ASMedia chip.