The Motherboard

Looking at the board, you can see the black / lime green color combination that's going on. To be honest, I wasn't a huge fan of the lime green combination originally, but when you look at the board when it hasn't got direct light on it, the green isn't as bright and it blends in really nice with the board. The black PCB is what really stands out, though, and we're seeing higher end boards opt for it as it looks great.

We can also see other little stand out bits and pieces with the ammunition clip being one of the trademark features of the G1 Killer line of motherboards. It looks pretty funky and you can see a bullet coming out the top of it for some extra attention to detail. It's nice they added that little bit and it helps actually show us what it is, instead of some weird shaped heatsink.

Before we move into the expansion side of things, two stand out chips around this area are the Killer E2100 chip to the left and the Creative chip to the bottom right. We'll get into these more when we look at the I/O side of things.

As for the connectivity side of things, we've got two legacy PCI slots and two PCIe x1 slots along with two PCIe x16 slots. You can see that the PCIe x16 slot on the right is wired for only x8 and shares the bandwidth with the left slot which is x16 when one card is installed, or x8 when two are installed.

Moving away from the PCIe connectors, we look at the bottom of the board and starting from the left we've got our audio header followed by three USB 2.0 headers. Next to that we've got our COM and TPM header along with our front panel header. Next to that you can see our "OC Button" header and that works in conjunction with the front panel device which has that "Quick Boost" button we mentioned.

Turning the corner, we've got seven SATA ports. Our three black ones which have one hidden just behind the main six are all SATA II controlled via the Intel chip. The two white ones also controlled by the Intel chip are SATA III and the final two grey ones which are SATA III are controlled via the Marvell 88SE9172 chip. A little further up to the right we can also see another header which is our USB 3.0 one.