The Board:

The board is laid out pretty well, my only gripe with the layout is the 4 pin ATX 12V header, I would still like to see this on an outside edge, it just makes wire management so much easier. There is also a 4 pin plug for a standard Molex right above the 1st PCI-E 1x connection, this also would have been nice to see either on the top edge or the right edge along with the rest of the connections. This Molex connection also forces the expansion slots down lower on the board. You might want to take this into consideration, especially if running in SLI. I would have had to relocate my pump if I was running dual video cards, as it is with a single card there is barely room for the pump.

The NB is actively cooled with a 40mm fan sitting atop a aluminum heatsink, in the picture below you can see the 4 pin ATX plug above the NB, and the 4 pin Molex plug is visible above and to the left.

Switching between normal and SLI mode is accomplished via a selector chip, this allows you to run in SLI with two matched SLI video cards, or one single or 2 non SLI cards in normal mode. Running multiple non SLI cards gives you the added benefit of running up to 4 monitors. Unfortunately I didn't have a second PCI-E Vid card to test this with.

Input/output includes PS/2 keyboard and mouse, Parallel port, Serial port, digital optical and digital coax audio output, dual gigabit NIC's, 4 USB 2.0 ports (rear USB ports can be increased to 6 using the USB "breakout" cable and the internal USB headers) and last but not least 6 analog audio ports for 7.1 sound.

The rest of the board layout is pretty standard, but there were a few problem areas I discovered once I had the board installed and starting adding additional hardware. First issue was the capacitors around the the area of the end of the video card. They make it extremely difficult to get to the latch that holds the vid card in place, and if you have a large cooler like an Arctic silencer on your video card you can forget about being able to access the latch from the bottom side. Another issue that might arise if you have a longer card is although the capacitors may not prevent you from installing the card, they will be extremely close to the card. The second issue also had to do with capacitors, but is going to depend on the type of heatsink you are using. In my case I am using the Swiftech Storm waterblock, the two capacitors on the top edge of the board interfere with the hold down plate and had to be gently nudged upwards in order for the block to fit.

BIOS:
For most overclockers what the BIOS looks like is more important than where IDE 1 is placed on the board, so lets take a look at the BIOS. The BIOS of choice for this board is the Phoenix Award BIOS . The 1st screen, nothing new of course, moving on to the BIOS features submenu we see a few "super" categories. Super Boot allows you to tweak load time, it basically saves configuration info to speed up the boot process. Super BIOS Protect is exactly what it says, it locks down the BIOS to prevent it from being damaged by Viri, Super recovery hot key, lets you set up Hot keys in case of any unexpected problem and Super Speed is where some of the overclocking tweaks take place.

Once your in the Super Speed submenu you start to see the amount of control over things Foxconn has given us with this board. Such as voltage control of both the NB and SB as well as vdimm and CPU voltage.

Under advanced chipset features is where you will find the memory options for adjusting timings, memory can be set to SPD or manual. Manual provides full control of timings

CAS 1-6
RCD 1-6
RP 1-7
RAS 1-31
RC 1-31
1 or 2T addressing mode.

You will also find other options here like LDT Frequency, SLI Broadcast etc.

These features should make most any overclocker happy, the rest of the BIOS is pretty standard so I wont go into detail about it.