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Board Layout

The board follows a very classic layout that shows some good promise for those who are picky about layout issues. The CPU socket is situated towards the center of the board, which puts it out of line of an ATX PSU's second fan, but this also makes it easier to access your CPU's Heatsink clips, since the CPU is aligned perpendicularly with the length of the board - a trend we are seeing more and more. The size of the board makes it easy to work with, you'll notice that the CPU socket area has a large clearance around it, and the DIMM slots are far from everything else. This does pose a slight problem though, since it pushes the IDE sockets lower down on the board; away from your hard drives. The AGP socket is a fair distance from the DIMM slots, but longer full length AGP cards will still give you some grief. The floppy connector is all the way at the base of the board, and this might be a concern for those of you with larger towers.

In leftmost picture below, you can see the trademark 2:1 split configuration of an Nforce2 board - the gap being your indicator for how to split your memory modules when running in Dual Channel mode.

The board layout is actually quite well done considering they had to squeeze 6 PCI slots in there, and you'll notice that FIC opted for a fanless chipset cooler, which is both more reliable and more quiet. This chipset cooler, by the way, is no less impressive looking that a fancied up HSF cooler such as the ones MSI and Gigabyte like to use.

On the rear of the board you will find a standard array of I/O. FIC managed to fit 4 USB 2.0 ports onboard, while 2 more are on an expansion bracket. The serial port is provided as an expansion bracket, as are the Firewire ports. Unfortunately, they don't include an audio expansion bracket, so while the board has 5.1 audio support, you'll have to juggle around the functionality of the 3 available audio jacks via software to toggle between 5.1 audio and other desirable functions (like headphones out, or audio in).