Motherboard Design and Layout (cont’d)
One
slightly aggravating feature is the location of the two fan and power
connections seen above. The one behind the secondary PCI Express X16
slot is basically inaccessible when you have a graphics card installed
in the primary slot.
Where
you’d normally find all of the SATA connections instead you only see
USB and Firewire headers along with the BIOS battery. NVIDIA’s
engineers relocated the SATA connections to avoid any complications
with installed graphics cards.
While
four of those connections rest up with the DIMM slots two of them,
along with the floppy connector, face away from the motherboard so that
secondary or tertiary graphics cards also don’t interfere with any SATA
connections.
The
external connections on the motherboard include two digital audio
outputs, support for 8-channel analog output, two gigabit network
connections, eSATA and six USB 2.0 ports.
The
EVGA motherboard comes with enough SATA data and power cables to
connect just about everything you can fit on your motherboard and also
throws in an IDE and floppy cable for good measure. Both a 3-Way SLI
and a standard SLI bridge are included as well.
Finally, just to round things out, we see the motherboard includes dongles for another Firewire connection, four more USB 2.0 ports and a legacy serial port.
