Product Showcase

Bear in mind that socket LGA 2011 requires a new retention mechanism, meaning you either need to upgrade the CPU cooler brackets, purchase a compatible cooler or alternatively go with the liquid cooled SKU Intel releases opposed to a tray CPU. We spot one 8-pin CPU power header, placed nicely at the side of the motherboard.

Components wise we only see good stuff, solid capacitors, solid core chokes, quality components. There is 4 x DIMM support for 64 GB memory, and support for unbuffered DIMMs at 1.5 Volts, DDR3 1066/1333/1600 DRAM. In OC mode you can use 1866/2133 and even 2400 MHz memory as well. So it would support 1GB/ 2GB/ 4GB/ 8GB DRAM sizes. Obviously, depending on the number of DIMMs in use, you get support for Single, Dual-channel and Quad-channel (four DIMM) mode.

Let's move onwards to the left side where we stumble into a bunch of SATA connectors. The motherboard features twelve (!) SATA ports just here and another two eSATA ports on the rear IO.

So the four white right-angle blocks are SATA II (3Gb/s) ports which are supplied by the chipset and they support AHCI and RAID 0/1/5/10.

All the way to the right you can see two SATA3 (6Gbit) ports from the Intel chipset. To the far left the six additional ports are SATA3 (6Gbit) connectors powered by Asmedia 1061 controllers.

We don't see how you cannot impressed by that, really nice -- very extreme.