In case you still haven't heard the word "Quad", if you buy this motherboard you're gonna get "Quaded" all of the time. Quad-Core optimized, Quad SLI Ready, Quad Gigabit LAN, Quad-Triple Phase, Quad BIOS, Quad e-SATA2 - it's all about the Quad. It almost makes me wanna pull out Dune II: Battle for Arrakis and build a substantial amount of Quads before I destroy some Ordos or Harkonnens.
Let's take a look at the mobo design pictures first:
The layout is pretty different if compared to reference 680i design. The cooling system is completely passive, so there are no noisy cooler(s). These pipes and heatsinks are copper-based, and they are actually going around the top-left corner of the motherboard and "fastened" just below the CPU socket. There's a good and a bad thing with this approach, actually. Good thing is the fact that, overall speaking, this cooling solution is really, really good - no overheating, no noise, pretty stable temperature, looks cool and stuff. But the downside is the fact that I had to dig extra-deep in my local hardware store to get some screws that are long enough to put our faithful Zalman cooler on the motherboard. The copper-base below the CPU socket isn't as thick as expected, so you're gonna have some problems with mounting certain coolers on this motherboard. The NB heatsink is doing the "45 degrees" thing, which looks kind of cool, although it takes some space. But all of this comes with the territory of being absolutely the craziest motherboard we've ever seen. And armed heavily for anything you might ever think of.
The Molex connector for the motherboard has been moved to the upper right part, just a couple of centimeters "north" of the memory slots (four of them). We like this solution a bit more then the reference approach, where Molex connector is stuck between the last memory slot and IDE/floppy connectors. Also, the front panel connectors for Power, Reset and LEDs are moved where they're supposed to be, on the lower right side of the motherboard. There are three additional USB connectors right next to the Serial ATA connectors, but guess what - it's not the six-slash-eight Serial ATA connectors motherboard. It actually has ten of them. Four of them are actually additional Serial ATA II, "handled" by two Gigabyte's SATA 2 chips. There are two additional connectors for Firewire, on the lower left side of the board, right next to the last PCI slot. This is a bit better then reference thing, where Firewire connector is between the slots. You might get in trouble if you use the last PCI slot, but we don't expect you to do so. If you have a SLI configuration, you'll be able to use them, no problem.
