The Box, The Accessories, The Board
Instead of white with gold text, we’re greeted by black with red text. Perfect colors for a lot of things in my opinion. Besides the cool, I find that the text is easier to make out than with bright, contrasting colors. Other than that, you have the manual (always important), a few free SATA cables (also important), and an SLi cable to give you a head start on multi-GPU setups. I’m obviously not using an nVidia video card, so I guess I’m out of luck there. Such is life.
These days, motherboards aren’t shipping out in all colors of the rainbow. You’ll typically see black, blue, or red all over. Of course, I don’t personally see this as that big of a deal seeing as how I’m never really looking at the board specifically when I’m using my PC. However, I don’t deny aesthetics can be a welcome feature so just because the PCB itself is monochrome doesn’t mean the heatsinks themselves can’t be fashionable. And really who doesn’t like colorful, not to mention slightly bigger heatsinks?
As you can probably tell, they bear some slight resemblence to the Iron Man suit with the metallic red and silver paint jobs. If they’d included a gold color then the ensemble would be complete. But I did get half that wish granted; the CPU socket has been manufactured with 15µ gold plating which does indeed look nice but, to my knowledge, doesn’t ultimately increase performance. Still, it does grant you some bragging rights.
For many people there’s a particular hassle that manifests itself in the form of storage space. As surprising as it is, there are those who need several TB hard drives for movies, music, and gaming. Eight separate SATA ports are left open for easy-access and a lot of it as well as extra capacity for more USB slots than the included six rear-ports. And on the subject of USB ports, something else was included to fix something that perhaps may not have seemed an issue (that I’m aware of at least). Each USB port has its own dedicated fuse, meaning if one dies the problem is isolated to that port and nothing else is adversely affected. Neat, eh? I think it kind of is.
The LED debug screen is obviously present, accompanied by the voltage read points and the glowing ring of divine excellence (or “power button” as it’s known by most people.) Unfortunately the reset switch is just a tiny blue dot, but I guess you can’t always have everything. Overall, the I/O layout is quite similar to the z77x, so I’m afraid I’ll have to be the bearer of bad news if you were hoping for a great deal more of extra stuff. But read on and I’ll introduce you to the finer aspects of this board.
