ASUS M5A99X EVO (AMD 990X) Motherboard Review (Page 3)

The Motherboard Continued

With the bottom half of the board looked at we can start to head north. In the top corner you can see our four DDR3 DIMM slots which support up to 32GB of memory at speeds starting from 1066MHz DDR and moving all the way up to 2133MHz DDR via overclocking.

Below our memory slots we've got our main 24-Pin ATX power connector, next to that a little three pin header and just above that sitting near the lowest DIMM slot you can see we've got a USB 3.0 header.

The CPU socket is pretty clean and to the right you can see our 8-Pin CPU power connector. The heatsink setup looks pretty good and you can see like most motherboards these days the area around the CPU socket is pretty bare.

Moving away from the PCB and into the I/O side of things, you can see we've got all our connectors here starting with a combo PS/2 port on the left. We've also got eight USB 2.0 ports controlled natively by the SB950 along with two USB 3.0 ports that are blue and are controlled via the ASMedia chip.

We've got a single 1394 Firewire port controlled via the VIA 6308P chip, eSATA from the JMicron JMB362 chip, Gigabit LAN via Realtek 8111E and 6 audio jacks along with an Optical out that is ran via the Realtek ALC 892 HD Codec.