Board Layout

Click here for a 3000x2500 high-res shot of the board (3 MB download), the backside is here.


The CPU area feels a bit crowded. The two heatsinks are quite tall but there shouldn't be any space issues, except with the biggest of coolers.


From left to right you have PS/2 Keyboard, PS/2 Mouse, Parallel Port, Coax SPDIF, Optical SPDIF, eSATA, Audio, Dual Gigabit Ethernet and four USB Ports.


The color coding helps to figure out in which configuration you have to put in your memory modules to run in Dual-Channel.

Connectors

The 24-pin ATX power connector is very conveniently placed near the edge of the motherboard. CPU power is a bit far away, but at least it's near a corner. I find it interesting that ASUS does not use an 8-pin workstation connector on this board. Also there are no extra 5.25" power plugs for Crossfire. Apparently this is working fine, there were no power issues during benchmarking at all. Our board also worked fine with a 20-pin ATX power plug in the 24-pin connector.


Four SATA ports are right next to the chipset. One lonely SATA port is available near the CPU socket area. This is because the SATA chip has two SATA ports while the eSATA on the back panel uses only one of them.


ASUS gives you two IDE connectors, which lets you to connect a total of four IDE devices. Most people nowadays have only an IDE CD or DVD drive.


The color coded headers make first time installation easy. In addition to that there are small labels on the board


Having four fan headers is ok. One more near the expansion slot area are would have been nice.

Slots

The most important feature of this board is support for CrossFire.
There is no need for any shadow cards, any PCI-E switch cards or other stuff. Both video card slots will run at x16 all the time. When running Crossfire it is important to put the Master Card into the primary (blue) slot. If you get it wrong, Catalyst Control Center will tell you when you try to enable Crossfire.