We really liked the colour scheme ASUS have chosen to use here. Black and Gold go together like hand in glove and thankfully ASUS have not spoiled the effect by having coloured capacitors. The ram slots and PCI(e) ports alternate from black to very dark grey with the remaining ports found on the motherboard all being black.


Flipping the board over we can see that the PCB is actually glossy in appearance. While we would have preferred a matt effect, it cannot really be noticed on the business side because of all the components so it is nothing major. There are only one set of holes for a heatsink so a skt1366 heatsink will not fit without an adaptor. Instead only an LGA2011 size cooler can be used. Each hole also has a thin membrane which needs to be pierced.


The socket area, like most LGA2011 is cramped. ASUS have however tried to negate this by thoughtfully curving the heatsinks away from the socket area but the proximity of the memory slots mean that fitting an oversized CPU cooler may prove troublesome, even with low profile memory.


The expansion port area is fairly well designed allowing up to three double slot graphics cards to be used. The labelling on the ports is a little confusing as not all the ports have 16 lanes available. Only the top and bottom PCIe ports (grey) are full PCIe 16x. The two black ports are 8x. In total there are 3 x PCIe 3.0/2.0 x16 (dual x16 or x16/x8/x8) slots, 1 x PCIe 3.0/2.0 x16 (x4 mode), 2 x PCIe x1.


The backplate features the following ports: 2 x Power eSATA 6Gb/s, 2 x LAN (RJ45) port(s), 6 x USB 3.0 (blue), 4 x USB 2.0, 1 x Optical S/PDIF out, 5 x Audio jack(s), 1 x USB BIOS Flashback Button(s), 1 x ASUS Wi-Fi GO!.