This motherboard has an amazing number of Serial Ports: eight. Four of them are SATA-300 and controlled by nForce 4 chipset, and the other four are SATA-150 and controlled by Silicon Image Sil 3114 chip, which can be see in Figure 5.

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Figure 5: Four extra SATA-150 ports controlled by Silicon Image Sil 3114 chip.

This board also carries two FireWire (IEEE1394) ports, controlled by VIA VT6307 chip (see on the far left-hand side in Figure 5). In Figure 5 you can also see some other small details of this motherboard, like the power and reset switches soldered directly on the motherboard, which helps a lot die-hard overclockers, and the colored front panel connectors, which makes the PC assembling easier.

As you can see in Figure 6, all MOSFET transistors used on this motherboard use passive heatsinks. Pay special attention to the sticker that comes on the motherboard power connector, stating the minimum power supply you should use. Pay attention to this connector and you will also see an extra power connector that is required by this motherboard.

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Figure 6: Passive heatsinks on MOSFET transistors.

In Figure 7, you can see the motherboard back panel, where all plugs are soldered. On this motherboard, its Karajan module is soldered to the motherboard. On other LANParty models it is detachable and it is very easy to make it come out of its correct place. This module is in charge of the motherboard’s 8-channel audio, produced by the nForce 4 chipset and decoded by Realtek ALC850 codec (signal-to-noise rate of 100 dB, which is considered professional-level). As you can see, this motherboard has coaxial SPDIF input and output. A different feature found on the back panel is that this motherboard has six USB ports soldered on it, while mainstream motherboards have usually four. As you can see, one of its two FireWire ports is soldered to the motherboard.

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Figure 7: Back panel.

In Figure 8, you can see all the accessories that come with this motherboard and, in Figure 9, a sticker for the back panel plugs, which we found to be a very unique and interesting feature, even though it must be somewhat cheap to produce this sticker.

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Figure 8: Accessories that come with this motherboard.

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Figure 9: Sticker for the back panel.

This motherboard also provides four DDR-DIMM sockets, supporting up to 4 GB of memory.