The motherboard piece by piece

From left to right, that's a combo PS2 keyboard/mouse connector, two USB 2.0 ports -- six in total, then two wireless antennae -- IEEE 802.11b/g/n, Wi-Fi Compliant and embedded Bluetooth v3.0. A Clear CMOS button, also two USB 3,0 ports can be found here as well as two eSATA 6G ports (the red ones). The weird looking button with accompanying vertical USB port is for ROG connect (external overclocking through say, a laptop)

We spot one Gigabit Ethernet jack and next to it is audio, which is managed by the Realtek ALC892 codec which supports High Definition audio up-to 7.1 channels. This solution is optimized by the ThunderBolt card which we'll address later on. Also the Realtek solution gets some Creative Labs optimizations with the help of a SupremeFX X-Fi 2 software layer. This will bring EAX 5.0 and OpenAL to audio. It also comes with the THX TruStudio Pro software.

When we flip the board around we stumble into the processor area. Nice and spacious thanks to the cooling, a big cooler like the Noctua NH-D14 will fit there, in fact we'll be using one of these puppies today. Clean looks surround the LGA 1366 socket alright. To the upper middle of the photo we see a CPU fan header, quality capacitors and chokes and also a NEC Proadlizer, which cleans the power signal.

The board comes with 8-phase CPU power, 3-phases for QPI/DRAM, 3-phases for NB power and thus 3-phases for memory.

We spot two 8-pin CPU power headers just behind the wireless add-on there on the back panel connectors; we see quality solid core chokes and obviously the LGA 1366 socket for Core i7 based processors. The board incorporates the latest Ultra Durable components like solid capacitors, ferrite core chokes, quality components and nothing else. This ensures stability -- but also reliability and extended lifespan.

The little red button is a reset button by the way.

Once we flip the board around once more, we again stumble into the six DIMM slots, DDR3 of course. Let's zoom in a little.