Starting at the top of the board we can see the mosfet heatsink I mentioned earlier. An elegant arching design that in practice did a good job of remaining quite cool during even high clocking operation. Next to it you can also see the 8-pin ATX 12v connector which has been placed in a very accessible location - nice work Foxconn.



Moving across we can see the AM3 socket. This board is compatible with all current generations of Athlon II and Phenom II chips including AMD's hex core designs.



The 890GX northbridge is situated below the AM3 socket. A passive heatsink design which in use is more than capable of comfortably cooling the chipset even under sustained load. Just make sure you at least have some airflow passing over it. This chipset contains ATI HD 4290 graphics and all the PCI-e 2.0 and USB 2.0 controlling. The chipset can deliver 1 PCI-e slot @ x16 speed or dual PCI-e slots @ x8 speed for crossfire application.



Next we get to the DDR3 slots. The board can accept 4x4GB DIMMS resulting in a total system memory capacity of 16GB.



Alongside this sits the 24-pin power socket and a selection of voltage monitoring points useful if you're an avid overclocker and fancy a more hands on approach to your voltage monitoring regime!



Below that are the six SATA 6.0Gb/s sockets the use the now almost universally useful right angle connectors. With todays performance GPU's hanging over the extremities of even full ATX boards like these there's simply no real space available for a socket that plugs in from above.