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Board
layout continued
There are 6 SATA 3.0Gb/sec ports. The
Nvidia Mediashield RAID supports
RAID 0,1, 0+1, 5 and JBOD span. As I mentioned earlier, the ports
are rotated and are on the edge of the motherboard. The included
90 degree SATA cables that are included should alleviate any clearance
issues with your HDD cages.
The I/O ports in the back of the board are pretty
sparse. The audio ports are mainly on the riser card so that frees
up a bunch of space. There are still 6 USB ports, 2 LAN ports, 2
eSATA ports, Firewire, S/PDIF and optical outs and a PS2 keyboard
connector. If you're still using a PS2 mouse, it's time for a new
one. One of the many kewl features of this board is the Clear CMOS
button on the I/O panel. No more resetting it with a jumper on the
board.
Marvell dual Gigabit LAN
controllers featuring AI NET2 and supporting NVIDIA's Dualnet take care
of the networking duties. Dualnet is designed to use two LAN ports
to eliminate network bottlenecks and improve overall system efficiency
and performance. The two ports can be used individually or
combined. Combined you effectively turn your 1Gb connection into a
2Gb connection at the computer. This is called Teaming. You
will also have a Fail-Safe mode built-in. In case one port fails,
the second port will automatically take over the networking duties.
The Firewire duties are
handled by the VIA VT6308P
controller chip. The VT6308P supports the latest 1394a speeds and
can auto configure data
speeds to 100, 200, or 400 Mbps, transmitting both asynchronous and
isochronous data packets.
The VIA
VT6308 is compliant with the latest IEEE 1394 standards with full 1394a
P2000 support.
The area around the CPU socket is nice and clean.
There shouldn't be any clearance issues with most aftermarket fans.
Like most boards, certain RAM slots provide just a
little extra. To get the most out of your RAM, I would suggest
using the white slots.
BIOS
Asus provides the enthusiast with an
excellent BIOS. The NVIDIA chipset boards that I've used in the
past have been very configurable and this one is no different.
Asus doesn't want you to waste your time, so the first screen you see
when entering the BIOS is the overclocking tab. Here you will find
everything you
need to turn your lame C2D into the beast you know it can be.
Click on images for larger pictures
This BIOS contains an
overclocking feature that I haven't seen before, it's called
level-up and it just lets you simply select the CPU or Memory that
you want and the board takes care of the rest. Which CPU or
memory you use will determine what your options are. In this
case, I have an E8400 installed. Since there is only one CPU
higher than that, the E8500 is my only option. However, when I
installed my Q6600, 5 other CPU's came up that I could pick from.
Selecting "Crazy" will let the board try to determine how high your
CPU can go. The rest of the options are pretty standard. Nvidia chipset users will be familiar with the linked and unlinked
setting for the memory. This is one of my favorite features of
the Nvidia chipset and really allows you to push your memory.
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