The Motherboard

Looking at the board, you can pretty much see everything clearly in just a single shot. The main thing is that it's just so small, though, coming in at 17.1cm x 17.1cm. Moving in a bit closer and taking the time to look around the board, we can start to see everything in a bit more detail.

In the expansion department we've got just a single PCIe slot that runs at x16. While there's not much going on down here, the inclusion of a proper x16 slot wired at x16 is a nice addition. Most of the time we see a x16 slot wired at only x4 on these mITX boards and in that situation you do really see a drop in performance when compared to a slot running at x8 or x16.

Turning the corner, we've got two RAM slots that support up to 16GB of memory at 1333MHz DDR. Below that we've got our 24-Pin ATX connector and to the left of that we've got our front panel connector. The only other stand out is just above the RAM slots which shows our battery placed in a slightly different way because of the board being so small.

Across the top where we'd normally see our CPU socket etc. we instead have six SATA ports. Two are SATA III while four are SATA II of which all run off the H67 chipset. Also around here, we've got two fan headers and to the right we have two USB headers.

Around the CPU area you can see for such a small board it's actually fairly clean. Of course, everything is quite close, but that's to be expected on such a small board. To the left you can also see our CPU power connector which in this case is a 4-Pin one instead of the normal 8-Pin we see on higher end boards.

Looking at the I/O side of things, we've got a combo PS/2 port along with six USB 2.0 ports. Moving along, we've an optical port along with HDMI, DVI and VGA for video connectivity. We've got a further two USB ports, but these two blue ones are USB 3.0. Above that, we've got a Gigabit networking port running off the Realtek 8111E controller and finally we finish off with three audio jacks which run off the VIA 8-channel audio codec.