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As you saw on the first page, the Asus P5B-E has a nice clean layout - however the color scheme is muted, dominated by greens and copper - not exactly fancy looking.

With the motherboard, you get a user manual, driver CD, I/O plate cover, IDE and floppy cable, two four pin Molex to SATA power connector splitters, four SATA cables and a dual USB slot cover round out the accessories.

The processor socket is surrounded by solid state capacitors, and I was pleased to see that there was enough room to easily mount even large coolers like the Noctua-12 we use for testing.  You'll notice in the pictures that not all the capacitors are solid state, compared to Gigabyte which uses all solid state capacitors in its impressive overcloker boards such as their superb GA-P965-DS3 and higher end "DQ6" board.. To the left of the processor socket, the Northbridge is passively cooled by a large aluminum heatsink, and a smaller heatsink graces the Southbridge to its left.  Passive coolers are very good, but after seeing the monstrous heatpipe setups on high end boards, these small passive coolers look rather insignificant.  Don't worry though, as you'll see later they do not inhibit overclocking performance.

The two banks of DRAM slots below the processor socket and the Northbridge are thankfully color matched to dual channel pairings; making it very clear where pairs of memory ought to be plugged. This is the logical coloring scheme, and I often wonder what possesses some motherboard designers to try to go back to a "color by channel" scheme?

For I/O, we have six SATA-2 sockets and an IDE connector to the left of the Southbridge, a right angle floppy connector below it, and on the left side of the board we have plenty of connectors for additional USB ports.

Above the Southbridge, we see the PCIe 16x slot, three PCIe 1x slots, and three PCI slots - however if your video card has a large cooler, you will lose access to one of the PCI slots. You can see a seventh SATA port in the upper left corner of the board.

The I/O panel is quite well appointed - we have the standard PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors, a parallel printer port, SP/DIFF and optical audio outputs, an eSATA port, four USB ports, a firewire port, a gigabit Ethernet jack, and six regular audio jacks.