The Motherboard Continued

Starting to move to the top of the board, you can see our four RAM slots. We'll talk about them a bit more in just a moment. Apart from that, you can see our main 24-Pin ATX power connector is present in its normal position.

Either side of that we've got a USB 3.0 header that can be used with the included USB 3.0 adapter. On the other side right in the corner we've got a power switch that makes turning the board on a breeze if you're not in a case. It also just comes in handy when you build your system and before you make it all neat with the front panel headers etc. - you can flick it on to make sure it powers up ok.

Moving around the board we can see towards the back against our heatsink we've got our main 8-Pin CPU connector. Moving out a bit more, we get a good idea of what's going on with the CPU area itself which like most boards these days is extremely clean.

We can also see our eight DIMM slots present which support up to 64GB of DDR3 RAM at speeds of up to 2400MHz DDR via overclocking. Overall it's just a really nice, clean looking board.

Finally, we finish off with the I/O side of things and starting from the left we've got two USB connectors and a PS/2 combo port. Next that we've got a button that will do an Auto OC for us, another which lets us switch between the BIOS we're using and a reset BIOS button at the bottom.

Moving along again, we've got Firewire, USB 2.0 and eSATA / USB 2.0 combo, next to that a further two USB 2.0 ports along with an eSATA-only one. We've then got two USB 3.0 ports running off the Fresco FL1009 chip, two more USB 2.0, Gigabit LAN via the Intel chip and our typical optical / auxiliary connector setup running off the Realtek ALC898 codec.