As we do with all our products, we show them in an image gallery. On the next few pages we'll show you some photos. The images were taken at 2560x1920 pixels and then scaled down. The camera used was a Sony DCS-F707 5.1 Megapixel.

Right, here we have the bundle. A little sober to be honest, ECS includes four SATA cables, and one external SATA cable to bring the total on the board support to 7 supported SATA devices. The Intel LGA-775 Installation Guide, the Quick Installation Guide and a well written user manual.

• X48 Motherboard
• Motherboard driver disk
• User’s manual
• Quick Installation Guide
• One IDE cable
• Four SATA 3Gb/second cables
• One eSATA cable
• I/O Shield

The rear I/O of the board is simply put, just fine. PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports are present to the left, then 6 USB 2.0 ports, really handy as more and more devices are USB including keyboards & mouse's. eSATA connector. Then two GIGe Ethernet jacks on the board provide Gigabit Ethernet.

Audio then; Six audio jacks a coaxial S/PDIF Out and an optical coaxial S/PDIF in/out connector provide support for the onboard audio. Eye catching is the massive copper passive cooling.

The 8-pin power connector is on the top left of the board under the rear I/O and next to the heat pipe heat sink. Below it Socket 775. The X48 chipset supports the latest Yorkfield 45 nanometer CPUs with 1600MHz FSB, meaning that any recent Intel Socket 775 CPU will work with this board, including all Penryn based processors.

A good location for the 24-pin power connector furthermore we spot the FDD port. The mainboard uses DDR3 memory with four DIMM slots supporting up to a total of 8GB of DDR2-1600 memory. To the right the 24-pin power connector.