The Motherboard Continued

Moving to the other side of the board, we can see this is where the bulk of everything is happening. Starting from the left, we can see our main 24-Pin ATX power connector and above that you can see we've got two USB 2.0 headers. Next to that we can see a little clear CMOS header.

Continuing to move across, we've got four SATA ports; the two blue ones are SATA II while the two white ones are SATA III, all of which run off the Intel Z68 chipset. Next to that we've got our BIOS battery and around this area we've also got our front panel header along with a pair of fan headers.

While on a whole there's a lot happening around the CPU area with a 4-Pin CPU connector present and a lot of other bits and pieces, it's actually for the most part quite clean. Of course, certain coolers / RAM / VGA combinations could cause a problem, but our Corsair H100 Water Cooler / Vengeance Kit / GTX 580 sat together perfectly. I'm not sure you'd have the same luck with a massive Noctua cooler, though.

On the I/O side of things which takes up an entire side of the motherboard, you can see we've got a PS/2 connector and two USB 2.0 connectors on the left. Next to that we've got a bunch of video outputs including DVI, VGA and HDMI.

Continuing to move across, we've got another two USB 2.0 ports with an eSATA2 connector at the bottom, and next to that we've got two USB 3.0 ports running off the ASMedia ASM1042 controller. Above that we've got a gigabit networking port running off the Realtek RTL8111E. Finally, we finish with five auxiliary ports and an optical port running off the Realtek ALC892 codec.