The motherboard piece by piece

Overall board design is just great. Everything is positioned really well. Let's move onwards to the left side where we stumble into a bunch of SATA connectors, let's zoom in a little.

The motherboard features six right-angle SATA II (3Gb/s) ports which are supplied by the chipset and they support AHCI and RAID 0/1/5/10. In addition to the regular SATA II ports, colored in white we see another two additional SATA 3 (6 GBit) ports, powered by a Marvell controller. Then a Jmicron controller supplies 2 x eSATA backpanel connectors.

They support RAID 0/1 and JBOD. To achieve RAID, select AHCI in the BIOS then during boot access the Marvell controller where you can set RAID levels. Yet another JMicron controller brings support for two eSATA / USB combo ports on the I/O panel.

Very eye catching is of course the overall design. We can see that a bit better on this photo where we can look at the passive coolers a little, the lower cooler is shaped after an ammo clip.