Continued

Upper photo of the board. Impressive, isn't it? You'll notice the 4x PCIe graphics ports an additional PCI bus and all the way to the left a PCIe 1x bus as well. Quite handy when you've stuffed all slots full with SLI and PhysX. You could use it for an audio card or something.

Rear side panel. Again, stuffed full as well. Let's handle them from left to right. We start off with the PS/2 connector, below it 2 USB slots. Then a CMOS clear button. One step to the right we see digital audio options. Both a coaxial as well as a SPDIF optical connector. The audio solution comes from Realtek, pretty much the only item that feels a little cheap on this motherboard.

Moving on we again see two USB ports followed by a Firewire port and an eSATA port. Next to that another 4 USB ports and the two Realtek gigabit Ethernet connectors. All the way to the right the analog audio connectors, multi channel up-to 8  (7.1) channels.

When we flip the motherboard around a bit we immediately spot the impressive cooling. Completely passive, heat pipe based. All chips are covered with passive coolers including NF200 north and Southbridge chips.

Just in behind the back panel we spot not one, but two 8-pin power feeds for the processor. Of course using two is not mandatory but should your PSU support it, hook up two or even a 8-pin and 4-pin connector (fits fine). This way you can take up-to 600 Watts of current towards your processor. Excessive you ask? Yes Sir. But taking a Core i7 over 5 GHz can already result into a power draw of 400 Watts. So I ask again ... excessive ?