Page 7

Who's your daddy? Now we close down the retention clip, apply thermal paste and place the fan on it. Oh yeah, the Intel reference fan, have a look as it's hideous!

Now is that thing dangerous or what ? It's Intel's reference cooler. I'm not joking here, but don't even dare to connect a cable somewhere with your PC turned on, you can seriously cut yourself. In all fairness it does it's job quite well without a lot of sound though. But still, I really dislike the cooling design. Imagine that a small wire will block the fan without you knowing ?

Here we see the memory sockets. As you can see this is still normal DDR, in my opinion a fine solution as it's dirt cheap + you probably have it in your current PC already, which makes the upgrade a bit less expensive. As you can see, if you want to opt dual channel configuration then insert similar modules into bank 1+3 or 2+4 (or all of them). This mainboard is capable of handling 3 Gigabytes of memory. I highly recommend that you use the Dual Channel configuration.

Connectivity all the way, The two yellow connectors are of course the RAID connectors. 2x RAID, 4x Serial ATA and 1x Parallel ATA for all your HD's, optical and whatever. RAID btw can handle modes 0, 1 and 0+1. You are not forced to use a RAID configuration though, you can use it as normal controller and add, let's say, a couple of HD's through it.