Here we spot the six, thus no lame 3 or 4, DIMM slots for DDR3 memory, supporting up to 24GB of RAM (with 4GB DIMMs when available) or up to 12GB (with 2GB DIMMs) through a 3-channel CPU integrated memory controller for a total memory bandwidth of 3200MB/s.

The ASUS motherboard allows over 2000 MHz clock frequencies. We'll show you some of that scrumptious bandwidth in the test runs.

See the orange connectors? That's two channel SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) RAID from the Marvell 88E6320-TFJ2 controller, next to the six SATA ports, positioned properly and NOT blocking any graphics cards. Also back from the dead, an IDE connector. Great stuff.

Check this out... Wind-Flow Thermal Design. Okay that's the marketing spin ASUS will give it anyway. Basically the Northbridge heatsink acts as an air duct off the CPU heatsink, that is, providing you use a normal top down heatsink design and not a heatpipe one like most of us use. Well, it seemed to work very nice, so props to the design team, it even looks great.

This photo alone was for the micro switches to reset and power on/off. I can not begin to explain how cool I find them, they even light up. Hmm, a CMOS switch would have been nice as well though.

From left to right - x4 PCIe, then 3x PCie 16 and two PCI slots. Okay, so here we have 3x PCIe slots. Now don't go thinking you can load her up with say, three GeForce GTX 280s. There's no space for that. So a maximum 2x SLI is possible. However for Crossfire it would be able to do 3-way CrossfireX with single slot design graphics cards. It's a bit unusual, but for 3-way SLI ASUS would like you to purchase their most expensive X58 board.