Board Layout continued 

The south side of a motherboard is usually very busy and this one is no exception. The cooling apparatus keeps a nice low profile so you won't have to worry about space issues with longer/larger size cards like any of today's high end graphics cards. The front panel I/o header is cased off by a black shroud, but you can see that it is color coded and the positive terminals have been marked with a + sign to make hooking up leads a little easier. There's even a printed chart right under the headers so seasoned system builders won't even have to open the users guide.

USB and Firewire headers are also down here and color coded to avoid confusion. Gigabyte avoided expansion card clutter with this arrangement by not placing them directly behind any PCI / PCI-express slots 

Gigabyte crammed all of those headers on the east side of the board to leave room for this... No, not the other next to useless legacy COM port, but those little grey button directly under the bottom-most PCI slot. The inclusion of a Power, CMOS Clear, and RESET button is a very nice feature for those of us that spend any amount of time on the inside of the PC. This is especially true when you start exploring the overclocking features of the motherboard, which will no doubt require you to clear the CMOS at least once to get back to a starting point.

Auxiliary sound inputs on the motherboard are almost a necessity and with limited space to work worth, Gigabyte did they best they could. The red and black header blocks in front of the PCI express slots are for additional digital inputs such as the auxiliary output found on most optical drives.

Heatpipe style coolers are in-use on just about every modern motherboard. While the more extravagant implementations also include fittings for  water cooling, Gigabyte decided to keep this one simple and straight forward. However, Gigabyte has recognized the importance of cool MOSFETS indicated by the two heat pipes that connect the rather beefy MOSFET coolers to the north bridge. Unlike other Gigabyte offerings, there was no fan that could be fitted to the cooler included in the accessories for the motherboard.

The placement of the front panel audio header (inputs/outputs)  will present yet another cable to stretch across the middle of the motherboard. If you can't find it right away, just look to the left of the CMOS battery, which has also been moved this far north on the board.