The Motherboard

The first thing you notice about the board is that matte black PCB which looks fantastic. It's one of the best looking PCBs on the market at the moment and if you've got a window in your case, you know the importance of good looking hardware. Along with that we've also got the trademark blue highlights that we see in the UD5 board. You ultimately just end up with a hot looking board. Let's move in a bit closer to see what's going on with the expansion side of things, though.

Moving in closer, we get a good idea with what's going on in the expansion side of things. At the very bottom we've got an older legacy PCI slot along with two PCIe x1 slots and three PCI x16 slots which support 3-Way SLI and CrossFireX.

Of course, if you're using only two cards they will both run at x16 / x16. If you opt to throw a third card into the mix, that moves to a x16 / x8 / x16 setup.

Moving to the bottom of the board, we've got all the typical connectors with our front audio, 1394 Firewire, three USB 2.0 headers, our main front panel header and a small reset switch on the far right.

Turning the corner, we've got a total of 10 SATA ports present on the board. On the right hand side we've got six controlled via the Intel X79 chipset. The four black ones are of course SATA II while the two white ones are SATA III. On the left side we've got four more SATA ports in the form of SATA III ones. These run off the Marvell 88SE9172 controller.