Intel 925X and Socket 775 Platform: PCIe and DDR2

Intel 925XCV Motherboard

The motherboard that Intel provided for the launch of their new chipset is, of course, one of their own.  What other way would you showcase your new chipset?

The board layout itself remains largely unchanged from the previous generation of Intel motherboards.  The area around the CPU socket is kind of crowded, but allows for the new style of heatsink installation, and a bit more, for larger ones should the market provide them.  The 925X north bridge is covered by a heavy, quality heatsink that is actually soldered on to the motherboard. 

The top x16 PCIe slot for your graphics card does come closer to the heatsink and DIMM clips than I would like to see, but this is a first generation motherboard.  There are four PCI slots split by two single lane (x1) PCIe slots. 

Notice that the 4-pin power connector for the power supply can also support a 4-pin Molex connector (the same your hard drive uses) instead.  The 4-pin male Molex connector at the bottom of the motherboard is for internal lighting or other uses as long as it draws a maximum of 1.5 amps. 

The 4 SATA channels are located directly to the right of the ICH6R south bridge.

The DDR2 memory slots are still arranged the same as any other motherboard and the ATX connector is as well.  This motherboard, as the rest of the 925/915 motherboards, only has a single PATA IDE connector.  This can be a pain for many users that have multiple hard drives and optical drives that they would still like to use.  For our testing, we used a PATA drive and an optical drive and usually we can ghost drives over for easy testing on the system using the second IDE channel — that was no longer the case starting here.  Time to setup a dedicated imaging station for PC Perspective now.

The Intel 925XCV provides a nice connection suite including Firewire, USB 2.0, Gigabit Ethernet and 8-channel high-definition audio.