Back panel connectivity then. From left to right that's a PS2 keyboard and mouse connector. A little CMOS clear switch. Then I count a total of eight USB 2.0 ports, 1x firewire, 2x Gigabit Ethernet. Digital audio in the form of both coaxial and optical TOSLINK connectors, and then all the way to the right the analog audio connectors. Well, that certainly is a good start, that back panel is certainly stuffed with goodies.

When we flip the board around we stumble into the processor area. We spot the 4/8-pin CPU power header to the front (great position), see ferrite core chokes and obviously the all new Socket 1156. The motherboard has a 16-phase design; that should be more than enough for overclocking and tweaking. The capacitors so close to the motherboard socket are a little so-so though.

The board's cooling design is passive, check out the funky design heatsinks. But allow me to zoom in on the DIMM slots for a minute.

As you can see below dual-channel DIMM slots you'll see this, three micro switches. These are the OV DRAM, OV IMC, and OV CPU switches which will allow you to override the BIOS limits on these settings and push the voltages up another 0,2 Volts over the BIOS maximum (be careful please, defaults are more than high enough already).

However, for those equipped with LN2 and balls of steel that function offers extra voltage say in an overclocking contest.

Once we flip the board around once more we again stumble into the DIMM slots, DDR3 of course, 4 x DIMM with a maximum of  16GB supported. The memory can run at very extreme DDR3 2133(O.C.)/1600/1333/1066 MHz modes, though non-ECC, un-buffered memory.

If you look at the DIMM slot itself you can see it looks a little awkward, like the left side retention clips are missing or something, that's QDIMM, locked on one side in order to be removed/installed easily. Very handy actually.

It really is a bit of a shame that Intel decided to leave triple channel memory only available to X58 / Core i7 related products. Then again, Lynnfield Core i5/i7 series will maximize bandwidth very well, even with a dual-channel setup. We'll show you that in the benchmark session though.