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The Board

Looking at the board I find a number of things I like - and some I don't.

What I like:

• Three PCIe 16x slots
• all the solid state caps
• the power button on the motherboard
• the reset button on the motherboard
• the CMOS clear button on the I/O panel
• the number of sound I/O channels on the sound card

What I don't like:

• if you fill all three GPU slots with double-wide cards, you cannot add any expansion cards
• the heat pipe coolers, while made of copper, don't seem to be designed to dissapate a lot of heat
• lack of eSATA port(s) on the I/O panel
• blocking an I/O slot cover with the sound card
• blocking an I/O slot cover with FireWire
• blocking an I/O slot cover if I wanted eSATA

Overall, the board looks very well made.

We get the more than usual pile of cables - four SATA-II data cables, Molex to SATA power cable adapter, SLI bridges, easy plug motherboard connectors, an I/O slot cover with FireWire and dual USB headers, two fans for chipset cooling, IDE cable, a POST LCD, and a back I/O plate cover.

Rounding up the included goodies is a Quick Start Guide, User Guide, driver/utility CD and a copy of Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts. Not a bad bundle at all.

The heatsinks and heatpipes look good, but I have to wonder if there is enough fin area for passive cooling. We have to remember that the 780i chipset is basically a new revision of the 680i chipset with the addition of an NForce 200 controller for dual PCIe 2.0 16x slots - and that the 680i was notorious for running hot.

In fact the heatsinks were too hot to keep my fingers on them for extended periods once I was testing the system.

Plenty of solid state capacitors here... the processor should get nice clean power - I expect good overclocks.

Asus color codes the DIMM slots correctly -- I hate it when dual channels are not indicated by DIMM color.

The SATA II connectors are the right angle variety, which does tend to keep the cables organized more cleanly in a case, but is also a bit of a pain when testing on a bench top!

The three PCIe 16x slots dominate the I/O slots, and if you use double wide coolers you lose access to the single PCIe 1x and two PCI connectors.

The back I/O panel has six USB 2.0, two Gigabit Ethernet, one FireWire, a PS/2 keyboard, SP/DIFF and Optical output as well as a handy CMOS erase switch.