The Motherboard Continued

Moving up towards the top of the board, we can see our four DDR3 DIMM slots which support up 32GB of memory at speeds rated to 2000MHz DDR via overclocking. To achieve those kinds of speeds, you'll need to be going down the Bulldozer path.

Also around here we've got our BIOS battery and next to that, the main 24-Pin ATX power connector. The only other bit that stands out around here is the single fan header next to our main ATX power connector.

Moving around to the CPU area, we can see our typical 8-Pin CPU power connector tucked away in the corner, while we can see the socket area is pretty clean as usual. The 990FXA-UD5 uses the newer mount which leaves the sides free. Also around here we're able to get a good look at the heatsink setup on offer which is always of great quality.

Finishing up with the I/O side of things, we've got from the left, a PS/2 combo port and two USB ports. Optical out, two more USB 2.0 ports, FireWire off the VIA VT6308 and eSATA off the Marvell 88SE9172 chip.

We've got two more USB 2.0 ports and another eSATA port followed by two USB 3.0 ports running off the Etron EJ168 controller. We've got a further two USB 2.0 ports and Gigabit networking off the Realtek RTL8111E chip.

Finally, we finish off with our six auxiliary ports which in conjunction with the optical port, run off the Realtek ALC889 Codec.