The Motherboard Continued

Moving away from the bottom of the board and starting to head north we actually don't have a whole lot going on thanks to the fact that our power and reset buttons are running across the bottom of the board instead of this top corner which is where we see most companies install them.

Instead up the top here we've just got the main 24-Pin ATX power connector and you can see the CMOS battery tucked behind that with a couple of DIMM slots.

Moving around the back you can see our main 8-Pin CPU power connector and moving out we can see our four DDR3 DIMM slots which support up to 32GB of DDR3 in Quad Channel at speeds exceeding 1600MHz+ DDR. We also get a good look at the CPU area which like most X79 boards we've seen is extremely clean.

Finally we finish up with the I/O side of things which starts off with a pair of USB 2.0 ports and a combo PS2 port. Next to that we've got an optical and coaxial out. Moving along again we've got four USB 2.0 ports along with two eSATA ports and a Bluetooth 2.1+ header running off the Atheros AR3011 controller.

Continuing along we've got dual Gigabit networking running off the Marvell 88E8057 Gigabit controller and four USB 3.0 ports running off the ASMedia controller. Finally we finish off with six audio ports which like the other two audio outputs run of the Realtek ALC892 codec.