The Motherboard

Looking at the board, there's nothing too out of the ordinary going on with the whole design. You can see we've got a Black / Blue combination going on with some Intel branding. Moving in a bit closer, we can see exactly what's going on in the expansion slot department.

We've got a single legacy PCI slot alongside two PCIe x1 slots. Finally, we have three PCIe x16 slots to round everything out that run in a x16 / x16 configuration for two card SLI / CrossFire setups and x16 / x16 / x8 for three card setups. Also around here you can see a little PC speaker towards the bottom slots.

Moving across to the bottom of the board, we've got our front panel audio header, fan connector, power and reset button, 1394 header, front panel system header, USB 3.0, BIOS reset header and four USB 2.0 headers.

Turning the corner, we've got a total of six SATA ports that all run off the X79 chipset with the four black ones being SATA II and the two blue ones being SATA III. Being an Intel board, it comes as no surprise that they've chosen to ignore the implementation of a third party controller to expand the SATA ports.