This motherboard has two FireWire (IEEE 1394a) ports controlled by Texas Instruments TSB43AB22A chip, one soldered on the motherboard back panel (see Figure 8) and another available through an I/O bracket that comes with this motherboard. This board also has 10 USB 2.0 ports, four soldered on the motherboard back panel and six available through I/O brackets (this motherboard comes with a bracket for just two USB ports).

ASUS M2N32-SLI De Luxe has two Gigabit Ethernet ports, both controlled by the chipset using two Marvell 88E1116 chips to make the physical layer interface.

This motherboard has an eight-channel on-board audio solution, produced by the chipset with the aid of Analog Devices AD1988B codec, but unfortunately Analog Device’s website isn’t listing the technical specs for this chip yet, so we cannot post them here. This board also has coaxial and digital SPDIF outputs soldered on the motherboard back panel and also independent outputs for each pair of channels, which definitely helps a lot setting up a 7.1 analog speaker system.

On the memory side, M2N32-SLI De Luxe has four DDR2-DIMM sockets, supporting up 16 GB up to DDR2-800. On this motherboard sockets 1 and 2 are yellow and sockets 3 and 4 are black. To use DDR2 dual channel mode just install each module on sockets with the same color.

In Figure 9, you can see all cables and adapters that come with this motherboard: six SATA cables, one 80-wire IDE cable, one floppy disk drive cable, three SATA power adapter for two SATA devices, one I/O bracket containing two USB ports, one I/O bracket containing one FireWire (IEEE 1394a) port, one fan for the voltage regulator heatsink and one SLI bridge.

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Figure 9: Cables and adapters that come with this motherboard.