The Motherboard Continued

Moving to the top of the board, we've got our four DDR3 RAM slots which like the 990 series chipsets also support speeds of up to 2133MHz DDR via overclocking, and below that you can see our main 24-Pin ATX power connector.

Two other pieces that stand out around here include a USB 3.0 header on the left hand side, while on the right hand side we can see our EPU switch and below that our Mem OK button.

Moving around to the CPU area, we've got our 8-Pin CPU connector in a typical position and you can see our AM3+ socket and the heatsink setup that's going on. Like most motherboards these days, it's pretty clean around here and you can see that ASUS are using that newer AMD bracket which frees the sides up.

Finally, we finish off with the I/O side of things with two USB 2.0 ports and a combo PS/2 port. Next to that we've got an optical port, two USB 3.0 ports off the ASMedia controller, Firewire off the VIA 6308P and four more USB 2.0 ports and two eSATA ports running off the JMicron JMB362 controller.

We've got a further two USB 2.0 controllers, Gigabit networking via the Realtek 8111E controller and six Auxiliary ports which run off the Realtek ALC892 codec which runs the optical port as well.