Installation, Setup and BIOS

The package was very plain and simple. There's NO fancy packaging... you just get the essentials and that's it. The motherboard itself, manuals, cables and the drivers on CD.

Installation was fairly straight forward, however, I felt that it was all a little bit cramped. There wasn't a lot of room ... the southbridge chipset is extremely close to my PCIe graphics card.

I did like the rear ATX panel. There's an external SATA connector, as well as a com port !! Yes, you heard me ... a 9-pin com port. There's also the usual ethernet, firewire and USB ports.

As for motherboard and chipset cooling, I was a little bit disappointed. Both the north and south bridge was cooled by a standard passive heatsink. There's no active fan or heatpipe cooling.

{imggallery 77}

The BIOS was very impressive. There's lots of options for tweaking and adjusting memory, CPU and DDR voltages, multipliers and frequencies. Ideal for overclocking.