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A Closer Look :::..
You've got to hand it to XFX, the box
is a real eye-catcher. Despite being unnecassarily
large for its contents in this particular case, it
treads the line between bold and tacky and gets away
with it. The futuristic pooch is possibly not what
your straight-laced office dweller would find exciting
but it makes a nice change from glowing red-eyed aliens
and futuristic transport.
The board itself was rather a surprise.
In all honesty I was expecting to find a plain green
PCB so the black, or more accurately chocolate brown
board was a bonus.
The layout is really quite well thought
out, and as you can see XFX have opted not to include
the auxilliary four pin power connector. The ATX power
block plugs in by the board's edge which is where
those who care about such things seem to like it alt5hough
to me it just makes for an unnecassarily long path
to the MOSFETS.
Because only five PCI slots are offered
there are no problems with your graphics card fouling
the memory retainers. IDE 3 is offset enough so as
to not interfere with long or full length cards when
fitted in PCI 2 or 3 but the floppy connector is bang
in line with PCI 2. This is probably fine as the cables
can usually be made to lie flat and allow the card
to sit on top of them but depending on the card design
this may or may not work. Yes, you can probably use
one of the other PCI slots instead but if for what
ever reason you can't don't say I didn't mention it
:)
Click For a Larger Image
The IDE connectors site nice and high
up the board which should help those with full tower
cases to manage their cabling.
A large, passive heat sink on the SPP
will no doubt please those who strive for silence
and believe all fans are evil. It's a shame it wasn't
gold coloured though! Those who rate a motherboard
by the size of its capacitors should be reasonably
happy with this one!
And the now standard three phase power
scheme is employed for both stability and cooler running.
You could probably spend a few days in some of the
more technical forums arguing over the merits, or
lack of, for three phase power circuits but that's
not for here, not today at any rate.
The red power and memory initialisation
LEDs give the board a slightly dated look but they
are functional.
Dual Serial-ATA connectors and an additional
single PATA IDE connector offer the ability for RAID
Levels 0, 1, 1+0 and JBOD with up to 150MB/s per channel
and support for Serial ATA, Ultra ATA-133,100 and
66 .
This is catered for with the BGA packaged
VIA VT6240 controller chip.
Socket clearance is superb top and bottom
but as is now standard it is too close to the board's
edge to make for comfortable HSF fitment in some brands
of case where the power supply is located close by.
The bank of capacitors (right, below) that sit to
the side of the Mosfets encroach a little too close
to the socket for comfort. There are no mounting holes
around the socket so more exotic coolers and water
cooling are probably out of the question.
The selection of hardwired back panel
connectors are your standard assortment with PS/2
keyboard and mouse ports, two USB1.1/2.0 ports, parallel
port, two serial ports, RJ-45 and three audio jacks.
There are three fan headers available,
one reserved for the CPU fan. Audio of course somes
cortesy of NVIDIA's MCP-T chip which offers genuinely
impressive 6 channel audio that according to my ears
rivals that of Creative's impressive Audigy line for
clarity though there tends to be a little more bass.
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