A Closer Look
This is one epic looking motherboard, there’s no doubt about that. With all black and grey hardware, it’s pretty stealthy and should blend in with pretty much any colour scheme. Of course, it’s packing a lot of RGB lighting, so you can easily customise the look to suit your needs.
The VRM cooling is robust, with massive heatsinks that are going to make light work of cooling the motherboard. As you can see, the chokes are plentiful too, and when it comes to overclocking, you should have zero to worry about here.
There are four DIMM slots, all protected by armour to prevent the motherboard from flexing. Of course, they also serve the purpose of looking cool, which is just fine by me.
Also tucked away here, you’ll find a power, reset and game boost controls. Onboard controls are great for quick overclocking and tweaking, especially if you’re working on a test bench.
Connectivity is plentiful on this motherboard, with a bank of U.2 and SATA 6 down the right side, as well as a FP Type-C, and 3.0 USB connector.
There’s another USB 3.0 on the bottom, as well as three USB 2.0.
Storage gets another boost from a bank of three M.2 drive mounts. Of course, you can see that they all come with M.2 Shield keeping them protected and cool too. There are four full-size PCIe slots, all fully armoured and well spaced to allow for multi-GPU configurations.
The audio hardware is hidden under a guard too, where you’ll find a built-in DAC and AMP, as well as all the general processing hardware. The audio should be super clean and powerful too, thanks to some dedicated gold capacitors, and a motherboard trace preventing any interference.
Holy I/O Batman!
The back of this motherboard means serious freaking business. There are only USB 3.0 ports here, seven of them to be exact. If that wasn’t enough, you’ll also find a Type-C connector for good measure. Networking is insanely comprehensive too, with three Gigabit ports, as well as ultra-fast WiFi built-in. The audio enthusiast in me is also excited to see a full-size headphone jack, meaning those high-end headphones won’t have to go through an adaptor, just hook them right into the board!
Finally, on the rear of the motherboard, you can see that the two huge heatsinks are screwed down, not just pinned. This fitting method ensures they’re more secure, and can even be removed for maintenance or modding requirements.
