Photos Part Two: The Motherboard
Here we have the really interesting part, the board itself.
Busy board here. Note the red antenna port cap to the right of the CPU power connector, keeping those things on the antenna ports is a very good trick indeed. Or maybe it’s just a lens hog. There are two fan ports with PWM control, a PCIe 16x slot, two ram slots, power/reset buttons, a vertical WiFi card and a horizontal mSATA slot, full 8p CPU power and 24p motherboard power slots, a socketed BIOS EEPROM chip (thank you zotac!), a very solid looking MOSFET and PCH heatsink, four SATA ports (two 3Gbps, two 6Gbps), front panel HD audio header and two USB2.0 headers plus a USB3 header. Oh and a label saying “SUPER OVERCLOCK”. We’ll see about that!
The bottom is pretty busy too, a bunch of caps, a power phase, all sorts of stuff. Mounting an aftermarket heatsink with a backplate could be a pretty good trick. Those three little blocky characters with four pins it a side are low RDS(on) MOSFETs. If those pins get shorted to anything you’re in for some fireworks.
Connectivity wise we have four USB2 ports, two USB3 ports, a PS2 mouse/keyboard port, two antenna ports, a Clear CMOS button, two Gigabit Ethernet ports (on an ITX board!) two HDMI and one mini-DP port and a full size audio output block. Impressive.
A couple angled shots, I finally noticed the antenna port cap by this point. The antenna wires are messy looking, but so it goes. Other than that, it’s a busy looking board but a nice looking one.
I think it’s time to install it in something.
