Continued

Here's where we land at Socket 1366 for Core i7 processors. Nicely colored in a black finish as well. I love these little details. There is plenty of space around the processor for all kinds of coolers. We fitted it with the latest Noctua cooler which is an excessive beast in terms of performance and sure ... size. It fitted/mounted perfectly.

Browsing down we arrive at the DIMM slots. Six of them, you want to go for a triple channel memory configuration really. I mean dual-channel will be fine as well, but come on ... think high-end man. You equip the RED slots first. Regular Unbuffered DDR3 Memory can be used up to 12GB total upto-2933 (!) MHz.

Moving onwards to the left we stumble into storage ports. Here you see 8x SATA2, up higher there's another one and at the back panel an eSATA port. Also the good old IDE (PATA) connector can be found.

So here all the way at the bottom we see a diagnostic POST LED. Should something not work an error code will be displayed here. Grab your manual and for example once it would read Code 26 .. you'd know there is something fishy going on with the display adapter. Very easy and handy for determination where an issue in your system is. Also should you system not boot due to an overclock on the memory or whatever, you can read out the diagnostic LED, hit CMOS clear ... and you'd be on your way to overclocking again.

Slightly above it you can see the passive coolers the motherboard is equipped with. In this segment the Southbridge chip is located, as well as the NF200 switch chip bringing the additional x16 PCIe graphics ports.