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The SLI chipset supports all current AMD Athlon 64, FX and X2 CPUs including the 3800+-4800+ Dual core CPUs. One big advantage of using the AMD platform is that you can use CPUs with the same Socket interface with the worse case scenario being a BIOS flash update. Intel recently released their own dual core CPUs, but they require a whole new motherboard chipset (955X or 945G).  CPU Socket  DIMM Slots The memory controller on AMD Athlon 64 and FX CPUs is on the CPU die itself. This alleviates the need for a separate North and South Bridge for the motherboard, as Intel motherboards require both. EPoX outfitted the motherboard with 4 184-pin DIMM slots, meaning the 9NPA+ SLI board supports 4GB of unbuffered non-ECC DDR400 memory, the same as every other nForce4 board.  PCIe x16 Slots  PCI Slots PCI Express slots are fast becoming the de facto replacement for the PCI slot and the AGP slot. EPoX outfits the 9NPA+ SLI with 2 PCI Express x16 slots for two NVIDIA based cards. With two video cards, the two slots work in x8 mode. NVIDIA recently announced the x16 SLI platform allowing x16 operation when two cards are inserted, but currently this is only available through Dell and their XPS 600 series of gaming machines. Other device expansion on the board consists of a PCI Express x1 slot and 3 PCI 2.3 compliant slots for backwards compatibility.  SATA Ports  2 SATA Ports  IDE and FD EPoX outfitted this board with plenty of storage options. 6 SATA ports are present on the board. The nForce4 SLI chipset supports 4 SATA 2.0 ports natively. EPoX added a Silicon Image Sil3132 chip to provide RAID 0,1 support for the other two SATA ports. NForce4 SLI supports the SATA 2.0 standard, offering 3.0GB/second bandwidth compared to the 1.5GB/second offered by SATA 1.0. EPoX includes 2 IDE connectors for 4 IDE devices. One floppy drive connector rounds out the drive expansion on the board.        On-board sound on the board is provided by a Realtek ALC850 AC'97 CODEC. The ALC850 is a popular sound CODEC that supports up to 7.1 surround-sounds. On-board sound has improved to the point where the necessity of add-in sound cards is almost non-existent. ALC850 supports DirectSound, EAX 2.0, A3D 1.0 and the various other popular sound APIs. EPoX also provides SPDIF optical and Coax Outputs to support Dolby Digital sound.  I/O Input and output devices on the back panel of the board include: 6 audio jacks for 7.1 surround sound, a SPDIF optical output and Coax output, 4 USB 2.0 ports, a RJ45 jack for the LAN, and PS/2 mouse and keyboard connectors. EPoX includes a fan assembly to cool the CPU area similar in concept to the ABIT OTES cooling system. One fan cools the CPU area. I'll discuss this a little more in the layout section of the review.  
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