The Motherboard

Looking at the board head on, the design isn't too bad, it looks similar to MSI with that Blue / Black color scheme going on and you can see we've got a pretty good looking heatsink setup. We'll look at all that closer in just a moment. Let's first take a closer look at the expansion slot side of things.

There's not a lot going on down here at first glance. You can see on the left we've got a single PCI-E x1 slot and on the right a legacy PCI slot. In the middle we've got two x16 slots that will of course run at x8 if you choose to run two cards in CrossFire.

The most interesting aspect here is between the two PCI-E x16 slots where we've got a mini PCI-E slot. If you wanted to you could use a mini PCI-E SSD card and make use of the Intel Smart Response Technology. Apart from that, there's probably not a lot of other uses for people.

Moving to the bottom of the board, you can see from the left we've got our audio header, next to that our CMOS battery, Parallel Port Header, Serial Port Header, two USB 2.0 headers, front panel header and a power button.

As we turn the corner, you can see just behind the power button we have another smaller button. This is a reset one and next to this we can see our LED debug header. As for SATA ports, we've got a total of six. The four black ones are SATA II while the two blue ones that point upwards are SATA III controlled via the native Intel chipset.