The Motherboard

Looking at the board for the first time, you can see that we've got that black and blue combination we've been seeing a lot from companies. It's a good color scheme and we can understand why companies are using it. It seems to probably be a bit more appropriate for someone like Sapphire, though, who does tend to use a lot of blue.

Starting to move in closer to the board, you can see our expansion slot setup which consists of two PCI-E x1 slots, one PCI-E x4, two legacy PCI slots and a single PCI-E x16.

The biggest surprise would probably be the inclusion of the Mini PCI-E slot. This is something we seem to be seeing a bit more of. You could use something like a TV Tuner or WiFi card. I don't think at the moment it's something you're really going to make use of, but maybe in time. What is appealing about it is the fact you can have a card that takes very little physical room.

Moving away from the expansions and onto the bottom of the board, we've got a speaker on the left. Moving across, we've got a clear CMOS button, reset and power buttons and switch that lets you choose which BIOS to use. Moving more along, we've got a USB 3.0 header, two USB 2.0 headers, fan header and our LED debug reader. Once in Windows, though, this tells you the CPU temperature which I absolutely love. It means that once booted it continues to remain useful and if you've got a window you can easily see your CPU temperature.

Turning the corner, you can see a total of five red SATA ports which all come in as SATA III offering us up to 6 Gbps transfer rates. To the left you can also see our front panel header that sits between our SATA ports and LED debug.