The Motherboard

Looking at the board, the first thing you have to notice is the good looking design with that black PCB and trademarked Sapphire blue color. What you end up with is a good looking board off the bat and we hope that it translates into some good performance later down the track.

The board is called the "Pure Black X58" and you can see that mentioned on the heatsink that sits towards the bottom of the board. Around here you can see some of the features, but we'll cover them in a little more detail in just a moment.

Alongside that aging looking IDE port, we've got six SATA ports here. The two red ones indicate 6GB/s ports that run off the Marvel 88SE9128 chipset. The four black ones are just standard SATA 3GB/s ports.

Across the bottom of the board we've got another SATA port, fan header and some USB headers. Across to the left we've also got a DEBUG display that will let us know any errors and a small speaker. Moving across a little further, we've got little red button which lets you reset the CMOS, while next to that we've got two more buttons clearly labeled which let you reset and power on the PC.

The easy access to power, reset and reset CMOS is an extremely handy feature for users who are hoping to do some real benchmarking. Long gone are the days of shorting the power header with a screwdriver.