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PHYSICAL DETAILS
A board's layout is important in several regards. The positioning of components
can dictate compatibility with other products like third party heatsinks and
long dual-slot graphics cards. Poorly placed connectors can also disrupt airflow
and make a system more thermally challenging.
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The board has a fairly good layout with only one obvious fault: the 8-pin
EPS12V connector is hard to access due to its proximity to the VRM heatsink.
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The SATA ports are on their sides which helps keep the cables tidy and
prevents them from interfering with long graphics cards. We also like
that the LED/switch headers are raised slightly; typically they are at
the very bottom which can make plugging in the connectors difficult.
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The CPU socket is surrounded on two sides by a moderately sized Northbridge
heatsink and a much larger VRM heatsink, joined together by a heatpipe.
The socket is a little close to the memory slots, but this is typical
of AMD motherboards.
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The back panel is stocked with VGA, DVI, HDMI, S/PDIF and FireWire ports
as well as a pair of blue USB 3.0 connectors powered by a NEC chipset.
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The heatsinks surrounding the CPU are only 30~31mm tall as measured from
the PCB surface so they pose no trouble for most tower coolers. However,
a 120mm fan heatsink oriented north-south will cover the first two DIMM
slots and interfere with memory that have tall heatspreaders.
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