The Motherboard

Moving onto the board itself, we can see that the overall design of the board is similar to Pro / Deluxe models we've seen before. We've got the darker colored PCB going on with the blue theme throughout the board. Considering the price of the board, it's not a bad color scheme and should look good within your case.

Moving in closer, we can see what's going on with our expansion slots. We've got two older legacy PCI slots on the right, two PCIe x1 slots and two PCIe x16 slots with one running at x16 and the other at x4.

One of the main differences between the AMD 970 chip that's used here over the 990X and 990FX is that we don't have support for SLI. Instead our only option for people who want to go down the multi card path is CrossFire. When you go with two cards, though, they will be running at x16 / x4 and that's probably not something you want.

Moving away from our expansion slots and to the bottom of the board, we've got our front audio panel header, FireWire, three USB 2.0 headers, COM1 header, front panel header on the far right and to the left of that, two SATA III ports.

Those two SATA III ports we saw on the bottom of the board in conjunction with the four SATA III ports here give us a total of six which all run off the SB950 south bridge. The positioning of two are a little weird as it does look like there's room around here to place them, but it's not really a big deal. Also around here we can see our little TPU switch.