It would be possible to go on forever about this device, but I intend to keep the techno babble to a minimum. Or at least that's the plan. As such I'm going to go through the main features in detail and then talk a little bit about the other bits.
The motherboard is very well designed and if anyone is interested comes with a slick black finish to the PCB (printed circuit board) and some interesting heatsinks draped across the board.
The first thing I thought when I saw these heatsinks was 'bugger'. They look pretty and they mean that you have no whiney little 40mm fans on the board (the smaller the fan the more high pitched the noise it produces, generally you can get fans between 12mm and 180mm). This cleaver design of heatsink also allows for the mounting of optional fans that come with the board so you can use a passive CPU cooler. These heatsinks are starting to sound like they are
a good idea aren't they?
Well they aren't, because of their position and height (58mm) it is impossible to fit any Zalman CPU (Central Processing Unit, interchangeable with processor) cooler to the board (they require a maximum clearance of 52mm) and its difficult to find a cooler that can be put in the heavily reduced heatsink/processor space. I did find one by Vapochill but it was a hard task.
Anyway, whizzing back to the installation procedure, apart from this one glitch everything else is well designed and though out. The SATA (Serial ATA, a connection standard with transmission speeds of upto 3GB/s for hard disc drives), IDE (older hard drive connection standard) and floppy connectors are all in the same area and the extra USB (Universal serial bus, those little flat ones you use for your camera) headers are placed all over the board making it impossible that you can't use any of them.
As is standard with any SLi x16 (a type of connection used for graphics cards, pioneered by Voodoo and now used by Nvidia) capably boards such as this there is a difficult with positioning of the other slots. The PCI-E x1's are normally situated at the bottom however the top one is very close to the edge of the lower PCI-E x16 and therefore single sided cards are a must in that slot (single sided cards are as simple as the name suggests, it is a device that only has components on one side of its PCB) and the PCI-E x4 slots are snuggled in with the PCI-E x16's.
Cooling the board seems easy, I'm having no problems at the moment not using my case fans and it is entirely stable.
-------------------------------------------------------- Main Specifications: --------------------------------------------------------
External connectors : 1 x Parallel 1 x S/PDIF Out (Coaxial + Optical) 1 x PS/2 Keyboard 1 x PS/2 Mouse 2 x RJ45 4 x USB 2.0/1.1 (5 x USB for WiFi edition) 1 x External SATA 1 x WiFi-b/g (optional) 8-Channel Audio I/O
Internal connectors : 2 x USB connectors supports additional 6 USB 2.0 ports 2 x IEEE1394a connector 1 x COM connector 1 x GAME/MIDI connector CPU Fan / 2x Chassis Fan/ Power Fan / 2x chipset fan connectors Front panel audio connector Chassis Intrusion connector CD / AUX audio in 24-pin ATX Power connector 8-pin EATX 12V Power connector 4-pin EZ Plug power connector
Comes with : InterVideo WinDVD Suite (OEM version) 1 x SLI connector 1 x IEEE1394 port module 4 x SATA cables SATA power cables for 4 devices 1 x 2-portUSB2.0 / Game module 1 x COM Port module 1 x UltraDMA 133/100/66 cable 1 x IDE cable 1 x FDD cable 2 x Option Fan 1 x I/O Shield User' s manual
The board is well designed and well priced, its a shame the RAM isn't faster, but everything else is top-notch. Its got all the normal bits and bobs and pulls of everything quite well, apart from those funny heatsinks. As you would expect the box was nice (some people like to know these things) and the manual is easy to read. The device seems stable at a range of temperatures and is well designed for gaming or high end computing requirements.
I bought it for about £120 and think its worth the money. With this device your not getting endless extraordinary features or anything like that your just getting a solid, reliable device that has what you need in order to be versatile with it. If your building your own computer thats exactely what you need. So from my point of view this is an excellent device from a company who is respected as being reliable yet flexible.
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