Photos Part One: The Box and Board
The box looks like a Gigabyte motherboard box, amazingly enough.
See? We get a Windows 8 sticker too! My thoughts on Windows 8 aren’t suitable for this medium and would probably get me fired and/or arrested anyway, so we’ll pass on the win8 front. Other than that we see the IR power bits being advertised, you’d better believe I’ll be testing them!
On the rear of the box we have a good bit of the specs/features page, plus some heat imaging camera pictures that are, in theory, of motherboards. Let’s open the box and get down to business.
We don’t get a lot accessory wise, four SATA cables and an SLI bridge are the extent of it. Plus a driver disk and a rear IO port cover of course, and some manuals.
The motherboard itself lives downstairs.
Pay attention to that “USB Mouse / Keyboard HERE sticker”, if they’re elsewhere you may not be able to use them to get into BIOS or install an OS. The PS/2 mouse/keyboard port is on the far left away from the official keyboard/mouse USB ports, which is sort of odd. Other than that we see a pair of MOSFET heatsinks tthat look nice and effective, and a compact PCH heatsink that looks pretty good too. The color scheme looks like Gigabyte couldn’t quite decide between black / blue and black / grey and hence went with a combo. Kind of weird, but not bad looking.
Those plates on the rear look like heatsinks, but they’re not. They’re just mounting backplates for the MOSFET heatsinks. They may help a bit as well, but there isn’t anything meaningful under them.
The CPU socket area is an important one for extreme overclocking, as it can be a real pain to insulate against moisture if it’s cramped. This one looks pretty good.
Plenty of power bits too…
The PCH heatsink looks nice
Onward to the connectivity!
