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Very eye catching is of course the cooling design. You can just leave this as is as it is by far sufficient enough all alone, but you can connect it to a liquid cooling loop for more extreme overclocking sessions and you can also use the additional heatpipe cooler we showed you.

Gigabyte calls this the Hybrid Silent-Pipe 2, a fusion thermal solution.

• Unique Screen Cooling thermal design effectively reduces the temperature around the CPU zone, and removes the heat between NB and SB area.
• Liquid Cooling system featuring special waterblock design with an enlarged dissipating surface area for enhanced heat dissipation and optimum flow-rate.
• High-Precision die forming technology utilized to increase the thermal conductivity of the material that makes up the heat sink.
• High performance Copper Heat Pipe with sintered process designed for ultra efficient thermal conductivity.
• External Heat Sink design utilizing a convection slot at the back of the chassis to increase thermal dissipation.

Let's flip the motherboard around once again, and here we stumble into extra connectivity such as USB headers, Floppy header, Firewire header, and extra Molex connector close to the graphics cards and the frontpanel headers.

When we zoom in on the frontpanel header block we see that everything is nicely color coded and noted down on the PCB. You just wish anno 2010 that chassis manufacturers and motherboard ODMs finally could create a form factor for this and make one simple connector for this instead of always connecting the 5 to 7 sets of wires coming from the chassis. I mean... we can put 3 bllion transistors on a GPU... this should not be a hard thing to design.

As you know, there are two NF200 ICs located on the PCB, functioning as switch chips for the graphics cards. Combined they add 64 PCIe lanes allowing full speed SLI.

1. 4 x PCI Express x16 slots, running at x16 (PCIEX16_1/PCIEX16_2/PCIEX16_3/PCIEX16_4)
2. 3 x PCI Express x16 slots, running at x8 (PCIEX8_1/PCIEX8_2/PCIEX8_3) (All PCI Express slots conform to the PCI Express 2.0 specification)

Crossfire will obviously also work with four cards, no need for the NF200 chips there. On the motherboard we spot chips from Realtek, the ALC889 codec, a FireWire/IEEE 1394a controller that runs on the PCI-Express bus and we also spot Realtek RTL8111E ICs for Gigabit LAN.

Ehm let me see... what more can I say, ah yes, in total there are four fan headers to be found, and then the two additional Molex connectors. Alright, we've confused you enough with all the data. Let's do some actual testing.