3

Socket LGA 1156 folks. Meet the new socket design for Core i5 processors. To the lower left the chipset Northbridge chip is located. Nicely passively cooled, we like no noise products alright. Below the processor socket you can spot the dual-channel DIMM slots, DDR3.

Once we flip the board around once more we again stumble into the DIMM slots, DDR3 of course. It really is a bit of a shame that Intel decided to leave Triple channel memory only available to Core i5 related products. Then again, the new point to point interface on the Core i5/i7 series will maximize bandwidth, and even at dual-channel with Core i5, that will be an lot of bandwidth alright.

Overall board design is great by the way. Everything is position really well. But let's move onward to the left side where we stumble into a bunch of SATA connectors. In total we get 8x SATA ports and then at the back panel we again see two eSATA ports. That is just a heap of connectivity. Oh and btw, check that out ...  SATA III ladies and gentlemen ... 6GB/s bandwidth, yeehaw ... we need that with the latest generation SSD drives that can nearly peak at full SATA II spec bandwidth already.

We flip the board around again 90 degrees and stumble into low-level connectivity. Color coded front panel headers, two more USB headers, FDD and even a parallel and serial port. You just can't deny that this is going to be a very complete motherboard alright.