The Motherboard

Getting into the board, you can see we've got this really dark color scheme that we've been seeing out of ASRock lately with a very black on black setup and some silver accents sitting in a few key areas. You get a good idea of what's going on with everything, but let's move in a bit closer and work our way around the board.

Moving in closer, we can see what's going on in the expansion slot side of things with two older PCI Legacy slots, two PCIe 1x slots and three PCIe x16 slots that run x16 / x16 in a dual card setup and x16 / x8 / x8 if you opt for a three card one. I would've preferred to have seen the second card sit a little further down the board in a two card setup, but if you're using dual slot cards you will still have a single slot between the two which is better than them touching each other.

Moving across the bottom of the board, we can see all our connecters which include HD Audio, Com1, 1394 FireWire, two USB 2.0, LED Debug reader, front panel connector along with a power and reset button to round the bottom off.

Turning the corner, you can see we've got a CPU fan connector on each end with eight SATA connector ports in between them. We've got four SATA II ports that run off the Intel X79 chip which are black along with two SATA III ones that run off the same chip. The furthest two on the left are also SATA III and they run off the ASMedia ASM1042 controller.