Ok, now that I am all smiles lets see what the rest of this board offers with its layout. Looking at the space around the socket you notice there are the four mounting holes for those few heat sinks that require mounting/bolting to the motherboard. Measuring around the socket it just barely fits a 80mm fan, so I thought I would test it with the large ThermalRight AX-7, which is one fat-based heat sink.

I would have preferred the socket to take a 90-degree turn to make it easier to install a heatsink, but at least it is not stuck up on the top of this board, which would have made it even harder to install a heatsink. Even with the space around the CPU socket there is never enough room. You can see here the AX-7 is even touching the top of a capacitor.

With a little adjusting it misses everything but it is Very close to both the ATX motherboard power and a capacitor or two. But like I said the sink does fit in with out touching them (I was able to slide a piece of paper between them, which didn’t really make me feel any better). One thing of note though is it is rather difficult installing the CPU because of another capacitor right where the screwdriver shaft goes into the CPU clip.

Again, it isn’t anything major because all you need to do is be careful and you have nothing to worry about. Then again this is PCA and we all know where that can lead.

One thing I don’t understand though is that there is that motherboard protector strip on one side of the CPU socket but not the side where you use install from. (This could just be missing on mine, but its something you need to be careful of).

On to the classic remove the videocard to install ram…. Well you will be presently surprised, your Videocard does not need to be removed. Again another strange oddity comes up though. On the other side of the middle memory clips there is a Fan header (generally a good thing) but it restricts the latch of this ram slot when a fan is plugged into it. It does permit enough movement to remove the ram with out any problems thankfully. So all in all I would say this is a pleasant surprise with many boards now overly cramping the ram slots, which isn’t an issue here.

About the AGP slot, it has the nice clip on it that helps secure your card, but that little clip is almost imposable to get to due to many capacitor’s surround that area of the board. My fingers are not that big but I found it very hard to get my card back out once locked in. This was difficult enough with the board sitting on a table and near imposable once I had installed this board into a case.

Like I mentioned earlier, the IDE ports are facing off the board. I did not know of this was a good or bad thing until I had it all installed in my case and I have to say I like it. Placing of the floppy connector below the last PCI slot also doesn’t bother me (mainly cause I don’t use a floppy) but if I did, I would just run the floppy cable under the board. Not only would this hide the cable but it is also the only thing that makes any sense. Interested in a Serial ATA drive? The placements of those plugs are well placed near the bottom by the battery.

Now the power plugs. This board offers both the normal 20-pin ATX power plug and also the additional 12v 4-pin line for improved stability. While the additional 12v plug is placed relatively out of the way (seeing how it is a small 4 pin plug it fits well where it is), but the standard syndrome of lousy placement of the ATX power is blatantly visible on this board like so many others. Still, if you take your time to design your wire layout you can get everything fit in nice and neat (which I can’t do cause I am in a time crunch for this review, but I have on other boards with basically the same layout).

Very nice! If you chose C as the answer you were correct! Not only that but look at the goop dispersion over nearly all the chipset. Not to much, not to little, this goop drop is just right. Another big plus for the Abit guys!

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