GigaByte GA-8N-SLI Royal           

     Taking in the whole view, this is a very familiar sight for Gigabyte motherboards. Getting down to particulars of component placement, most of the motherboard has a very common sense layout, but there has been some interesting choices made on a couple of items.

     Every quadrant of the motherboard is packed with connectors, headers, and ports. The two chipset native IDE connectors are placed in the typical side-by-side arrangement while the additional IDE RAID connector is placed and pointed toward the edge of the motherboard. The floppy connector is right next to the 24-pin ATX power supply connector which is right below the pairing of DDR2 ram slots. The Media Control Processor (Southbridge) heatsink is of incredibly low profile so as to not interfere with the video card installation in the primary PCI Express slot. The ram slots are positioned far enough away from the PCI Express video slot that the video card won't interfere with RAM installation/removal.

     The bottom edge of the board remains fairly typical with the Serial ATA, USB 2.0 and Firewire IEEE-1394b headers, and the connection point for the enclosure faceplate LEDs and buttons. While there are only two standard 1x PCI slots, they are positioned VERY low on the motherboard, leaving the upper piece of real-estate for the 2x PCI Express x16 and 2x PCI Express x8 slots.