The Motherboard

Looking at the board, it of course doesn't carry that sexy red and black setup that we saw on our ROG Crosshair V Formula board. It's still a pretty good looking board, though, thanks to that dark PCB, nice blues and a pretty meaty looking heatsink setup.

Moving away from the whole board and getting in closer, we can start to look at our expansion slots. We've got a single legacy PCI slot, two 1x PCI-E slots and three x16 PCI-E slots. While the 990FX chipset carries with it support for dual x16 when two video cards are used, the 990X supports only dual x8 when two cards are used. As for the third slot (black), that only supports x4 speed.

Moving to the bottom of the board, you can see all our headers here. From the left we've got S/PDIF and 1394 FireWire. Next to that we've got two switches that enable TPU and EPU; two ASUS features. Moving along again, we've got three USB headers, a COM header, fan header and our front panel system header.

Turning the corner, we've got a total of eight SATA ports. The six white ones are SATA III and controlled via the AMD SB950 chip; the other two are SATA II and controlled via the JMicron JMB362 controller.