The audio is taken care of by the Realtek ALC650 with 6 connections available for use. 3 of these are your Line Out for front/stereo, rear and centre/sub. 2 are for your Line In and Mic In as well as an SP/DIF port for Digital out. I would have to say this is the best onboard sound I have seen, from the hardware and its connections to the software and all of its features. The sound itself is very balanced with lots of options available with the software to test and tweak it to your liking. There are presets for the 5.1 surround such as hall and stadium, as well as a 10 band EQ. Those of you using just 2 speakers can benefit from some of these more advanced features too, as many of the settings can make a nice difference to the stereo sound. And if none of them appeal to you there is always the 3D Depth slider found within the Volume Control Panel applet which basically intersperses the Stereo sound with opposite channels slightly to fool you into thinking there is a greater area for the sound to bounce around in than there actually is. Performance wise, the sound uses about 5% of your CPU power, but for those of you with high clocked CPU's it isn't something you will notice in everyday situations.

For the 4 USB 2.0 that's onboard the VIA VT6202 is employed. These are EHCI 0.95 compliant USB ports, and whilst there are newer EHCI 1.0 offering up to 20% more bandwidth I've yet to see anything with this. I was a little worried that with all these connections for USB would overload the board for those devices that draw power from the USB. On some of my earlier mainboards I had a few problems with the devices not receiving enough power and either locking up the machine totally or as was more often the case, the device being starved of too much power that the power to the USB port in question was cut off and only a reboot would bring it back on. I overloaded the USB ports with every device I could find (Alcatel Modem, Intellimouse, keyboard, Camera, Printer and Scanner), using them all at once to see if I could see any problems. No problems at all power wise.

Looking at the rear ports you can instantly see the difference from the norm. Gone are the 2 PS/2 ports replaced with 2 USB 1.1 ports. Below them are a further 2 USB 1.1 ports as seen on many boards today. Next comes 2 Firewire ports followed by the SP/DIF out and the rest of the sound jacks. Finally we see 2 USB 2.0 ports and the 10/100 LAN port. A custom I/O shield for your case is included so there aren't any worries about having to modify or lose the plate around the sockets, just simply remove the old plate and replace it with the included one.

Reviewing all of the above comments, even with the little problems here and there, this is one of the best layouts I have personally seen. The board is packed with features and expansion options even though at first glance the board seems to be very bare.

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