As we mentioned, this motherboard has three PCI Express x16 slots supporting CrossFire, two of them truly working at x16 and the third one working at x4. This motherboard has also three standard PCI slots but no PCI Express x1 slots.

Using Intel ICH9R south bridge chip, this motherboard has six SATA-300 ports supporting RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10. An additional JMicron JMB363 brings two eSATA-300 ports located on the rear panel of the board and one ATA-133 port.

The south bridge chip provides 12 USB 2.0 ports (six on the rear panel and six available thru headers on the motherboard) and this board also has two Firewire (IEEE1394) ports (one on the rear panel and another available thru a header on the motherboard).

On Figure 6 you see the rear panel from this motherboard: PS/2 mouse connector, PS/2 keyboard connector, two eSATA-300 ports, six USB 2.0 ports, one Firewire (IEEE1394) port, two Gigabit Ethernet ports and optical and coaxial SPDIF outputs.

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Figure 6: Rear panel.

As you can see this board doesn’t have serial or parallel ports on the rear panel, even though one serial port is available thru a header on the motherboard and you will need to install an I/O bracket to use it.

If you paid close attention on Figure 6 you noticed that this motherboard doesn’t have on-board analog audio connectors (SPDIF outputs are produced by the south bridge chip). Audio is available thru a riser card, which has the audio codec and the analog audio connectors.

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Figure 7: Audio riser card.

This audio card is based on Realtek ALC885 codec, which provides an outstanding audio quality: eight channels, 24-bit resolution, up to 192 KHz sampling rate for both the inputs and outputs, 101 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the inputs and 106 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the outputs. We always complain that almost all motherboards available on the market have a very low signal-to-noise ratio on its inputs (i.e. lower than 95 dB) and this motherboard is a good exception, meaning that you can use it to capture and edit analog audio without worrying about noise.

On this prototype all electrolytic capacitors are solid, as expected on a high-end product, and all coils from the voltage regulator are ferrite coils, which provides a lower power loss compared to the traditional iron coils. Unfortunately Foxconn didn’t use solid aluminum capacitors on the audio card, but regular electrolytic capacitors from Chemi-Con (Japanese) and Evercon (Taiwanese). They should have used solid capacitors on the audio section as well or at least only Japanese caps.

This motherboard has also on-board power, reset and clear CMOS switches, which are quite handy for overclockers, and a POST diagnostics display, which allows you to find out thru a two-digit code what is wrong with your computer if it doesn’t turn on.

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Figure 8: Power, reset and clear CMOS switches and POST diagnostics display.