Product Showcase

Check out the PCIe slot connectivity, that's seven PCI Express x16 slots. Four of these PCIe slots are linked to the Sandy Bridge-E processor are PCI Express 3.0 compatible, while the remaining three are fed by an added PLX PEX8608 IC chip, which will be good ol' PCIe Gen 2 complaint.

We get this question a lot through email, but a Gen 3 slot is backwards compatible so a PCIe Express 2.0 graphics card will work absolutely fine, you'll simply fall back to Gen 2 bandwidth. Four dual-slot graphics cards can be seated just fine.

Slot 1/3/5/7 are PCie Gen 3 and thus have double bandwidth. 1 and 5 support Gen 3 x16. When the four slots are utilized you'll jump back to x8 mode, yet at Gen 3 that's the same as PCie Gen 2 in x16 mode bandwidth wise.

The three PCIe Gen 2 slots are 2, 4 and 6 and get their bandwidth from an added PLX PEX8608 IC chip.

The motherboard makes note of the fact it could support Quad SLI, the cards need to have x8 PCie slots assigned on slot Slot 1/3/5 or 7 before that's going to work. And with the included SLI bridges you can setup your preferred SLI mode up-to Quad SLI and Crossfire.

Oh and that Creative Labs X-Fi sticker? Underneath the heatsink is a standard Realtek ALC898 Codec IC. A Creative labs software layer is added for extra audio functionality.

Above the USB 3.0 controllers, as you can see NEC D720200 ICs. We explained these a couple of times already, so I'll save you the time.

Overall the motherboard is feature rich and good looking. The board has a good six fan headers btw, RPM manageable in the BIOS. Very impressive specs.