There are a total of six ATA133 IDE headers, two are your standard VIA offering (just right of the DIMM slots) with the other four being made available through the Highpoint HPT374 (bottom right of the board), providing you with a total of 12 IDE devices for use. The Highpoint IDE headers are lower down in the board, and being designed for RAID this is not a problem for most position wise in that chances are you tower is designed to have your hard drives in the lower half. Just below these is the floppy header, right at the bottom of the board. This is something that has personally not been a problem for me, but those of you with full towers with the floppy on top should note your going to need a long floppy cable. Being marketed as a legacy free motherboard you may be surprised to see the floppy drive available here, but even though for the majority of people it probably sits in your tower gathering dust, there are still some uses for it, such as updating your bios and on rare occasions even drivers.

There are 2 LED's on this board, a yellow and a green. The yellow LED means the board is receiving power from the PSU; it's a safety feature to let you know that there is still power available to the motherboard even if it isn't powered up. There is also a green LED which illuminates when the system and therefore the board is turned on. You can also see the battery and CMOS clear jumper. Very minor point here, and not totally unique (but something that is rare in my experience) is the jumper used here has a tail on it, which makes moving the jumper a lot easy, especially for those with dinner plates for hands.

The three PCI slots are surrounded with the various headers for Firewire and USB expansion. The IEEE1394 header is also used for connecting the aftermarket Abit Media XP drive unit. Just above the PCI slots on the right hand side is a square Chip from Texas instruments, which is responsible for the onboard Firewire. Also around here are the CD/AUX connectors for connecting to your CD-ROM drives. Being low down by the PCI slots is going to create problems for some. I'm not to worried about this positioning however as I would expect most users of this board to use digital rather than analogue to get CD sound from the drives, but thought it was worth a mention.

The AGP slot here is higher placed than the majority of motherboards I have seen, sitting in the very top slot of my tower (all other boards I have used in the tower sat just one below it) and has a retaining mechanism which should aid in holding the card in place for those of you who regularly move your PC around. I would have preferred a higher clip than the one it has, as trying to unclip the card can be difficult without a screwdriver to put between the card and the clip. Installation is pretty much the same as putting in a DIMM. You push the card in and the clip slots into place.

Previous Page - The Motherboard

Next page - Motherboard (continued 2)