The Motherboard Continued

Turning the corner again and moving towards the top of the board, we've got two DDR3 RAM slots here that support up to 16GB of RAM with speeds from 1066MHz DDR to 2400MHz DDR via overclocking, or 1866MHz DDR via the built in memory dividers.

Below our RAM slots we've got our main 24-Pin ATX Power Connector and next to that you can actually see our Front Panel header which is in a bit of a weird position. The mATX format, though, means that some things have to get moved around a little bit and in this case it's the front panel header to the top of the board.

Moving around to the CPU side of things, you can see our CPU Power Connector comes in the form of a single 4-Pin connector instead of the 8-Pin we see on the higher end boards. As for the area around our FM1 socket; like most boards these days it's pretty clear and you can see we're using that new mounting system we saw introduced with the 990FX series of boards.

Finally, we finish off with the I/O side of things and it's actually pretty bare. We've got two PS/2 ports on the left followed by a VGA and DVI port for video out. Next to that we've got four USB 2.0 ports and a Gigabit networking port running off the Realtek RTL8111E chip, while our three auxiliary plugs run off the Realtek ALC887 codec.