Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6
revision 2.0

     Expansion will come pretty easy with five PCI-E and two PCI slots. Of course, the smaller black PCI-E slots are only x1 but both the blue and orange full-length PCI-E slots are x16 for graphics cards. It also goes without saying that this is only for ATI Crossfire as there is no official support from nVidia for SLI on Intel chipsets. The remaining two standard PCI slots should round out the expansion potential of the board quite nicely. Personally, it still seems a little skinny to only see two standard PCI slots on a motherboard. But when you take into consideration that the motherboard itself has onboard LAN, Sound, and additional RAID support, the extra two PCI slots have a good chance of going unused to begin with.

     Here we can see the locking mechanisms that will hold your full length video cards in place in the two PCI-E slots.

     Before getting to the CPU socket, I just wanted to put a quick highlight on the CPU fan header. It's located just above the top-most PCI-Ex1 slot. If you notice, the battery for the board's CMOS is located up here as well.

     The CPU socket is lined on two sides by the a series of capacitors and coils. Special care and consideration will have to be taken when choosing and actually installing a heatsink on the CPU. If you're planning on water cooling, then obviously there will be no problems on this side.