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Starting in the upper right hand corner, the board has two 8-pin power connectors. This provides power to the CPU on the board and the extra power should allow for more overclocking headroom. The CPU Socket is of the LGA-1366 variety with enough room around the Socket to install after-market cooling.  Board  CPU Socket  Dual 8-pin  Rear of board The MOSFETS are covered by a black heatsink with a heatpipe leading to the X58 chipset heatsink. That heatsink extends to cover the ICH10R Southbridge chip. This is a cool looking geometric design heatsink that has a lot of surface area the better to dissipate the heat from the chips. The memory DIMMs are located under the CPU Socket. The board has six DIMM slots for up to 24GB of DDR3 memory. The bottom of the board starts off with a Power Fan header. The Start and Reset buttons are next. Below the start and Reset buttons are eight probe points for the Probeit accessory. There are four on/off switches next to the Reset button. These are for the PCIe lanes to switch each of the PCIe x16 slots to deliver power or not.  X58  ROG logo  CPU area  Molex The GO button is there for enabling MemOK during POST. This allows incompatible memory to be run in compatibility mode ensuring memory compatibility. There is a BIOS button on the board to switch the BIOS between the two on the board. There is a Q-Reset button which temporarily stops the power to the CPU when using LN2 (Liquid Nitrogen) to help the CPU recover from frozen state. There is a wide array of LEDs to indicate the voltage conditions of the CPU, memory, Northbridge and Southbridge. The CPU, CPU PLL and QPI/DRAM, DRAM bus, IOH, IOH PCIE, ICH and ICH PCIE Voltage display has three conditions: Normal (green), High (yellow), Crazy (red). The other LEDs on the board include a BIOS LED, a GO LED, a HDD LED and a Q LED. Q LED monitors the CPU, DRAM, VGA and Boot Device LEDs that indicate a problem on POST.  LEDs  PCIE Switches  Power and Reset  Probeit The 24-pin power connector is next to the Chassis Fan header. There are two SATA 6 GB/s ports colored red as well as seven SATA 2 ports with six sideways facing ports. There are two iROG chips above the SATA ports. The upwards facing SATA port is for the external SATA drive. The next item on the board is a BIOS Switch which I described earlier. The left side of the board starts with the Front Panel I/O which is labeled. The next item is a Chassis Fan header. A single USB header is next followed by the OC Station header, a Chassis Fan and Opt Fan header. The Opt Temp connector is next followed by an IEEE1394 header. The next item is the EZ Plug 2 4-pin power followed by the CD-In and AAFP headers. A header for S/PDIF is on top of the CD In header. The onboard audio is provided by a Realtek ALC889 CODEC that has been their stalwart audio CODEC for the last couple of years. The ALC889 is High Definition Audio compliant CODEC with support for multi-streaming, and has High performance DACs with 108dB and ADCs with 104dB SNR. This supports Content Protection for Full Rate loss-less DVD Audio, Blu-Ray audio and HD-DVD audio content playback.  RC Bluetooth  SATA  Expansion  Rear I/O The Rear I/O on the board consists of a PS/2 Keyboard port, 2 USB 3.0 ports, 7 USB 2.0 ports with one being used for ROG Connect, an External SATA port, a LAN RJ45 port, a CLR CMOS switch, a ROG Connect On/Off switch, a S/PDIF Out Optical, a Firewire port and 6 jacks for 7.1 Surround sound. The RC Bluetooth button and connector is also located here. Contents:
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