Product Showcase

The motherboard has a lot connectivity on the rear IO panel. We spot two NEC based USB 3.0 connectors, next to the eight USB 2.0 ports located at the rear side. We spot Optical and Coaxial TOSLINK S/PDIF audio for eight-channel audio, a traditional PS2 mouse/keyboard connector. We see one RJ-45 Ethernet jack supporting Gigabit LAN/WAN. All the way to the left you can see a small black button, that is a clear CMOS button.

When we flip the board around 90 degrees we stumble into the processor socket, LGA1155 we'll take a closer look in a minute.  Here we can also see one 8-pin CPU power header conveniently placed at the far side of the edge. The VRM/MOSFETS/Choke area is nicely covered with passive cooling. Good quality components are being used here, overall a clean and very decent design. We spot one FAN header here, preferably that would have been two as in near vicinity you will not spot any other headers. To the right of the FAN header is an array of phase LEDs, depending on board load these will emit blue LED activated lights.

As you guys know a new socket is required for the Sandy Bridge processors. If we zoom in a little we can spot lots of room around socket LGA 1155, also we spot quality capacitors and solid core chokes. There is a decent amount off space available for any type of cooling.

The ATX motherboard power connector is position properly, with above it the four DDR3 DIMM slots. The motherboard can take up-to 16GB of memory clocked at 1333 MHz. There are no specific overclock modes for this board in the Firmware, though by tweaking a little with memory dividers you can take it up a notch or two.

The SBIOS firmware by itself serves its function well, but do not expect overclocking armada, everything is kept simple, overclockable but within very safe limitations. You will however be able to take say a 2600K processor to 4500 MHz quite easily.