Gallery 2

Check that out, from left to right that's a PS2 keyboard and mouse connector. A little CMOS clear switch. Then I count a total of eight USB 2.0 ports, 1x firewire, 2x Gigabit Ethernet. Digital audio in the form of both coaxial and optical TOSLINK connectors, and then all the way to the right the analog audio connectors. Well, that certainly is a good start, that back panel is certainly stuffed with goodies.

When we flip the board around we stumble into the processor area. We spot the 8-pin CPU power header to the front (great position), see ferrite core chokes and obviously the all new Socket 1156. The motherboard has a 16-phase design; that should be more than enough for overclocking and tweaking. The board's cooling design is passive, check out the funky design heatsinks.

Below the processor socket you can spot the dual-channel DIMM slots, and just below that ... this, three micro switches. These are the OV DRAM, OV IMC, and OV CPU switches which will allo you to override the BIOS limits on these settings, (already more than high enough to void warranties or damage your CPU). However, for those needing that extra voltage in an overclocking contest, it's there.

Once we flip the board around once more we again stumble into the DIMM slots, DDR3 of course.

4 x DIMM, max. 16GB, DDR3 2133(O.C.)/1600/1333/1066 MHz, non-ECC, un-buffered memory. It really is a bit of a shame that Intel decided to leave triple channel memory only available to X58 / Core i7 related products. Then again, the new point to point interface on the Core i5/i7 series will maximize bandwidth, and even at dual-channel with Core i5, that will be an lot of bandwidth alright.