The CPU socket itself is astonishingly clean and clear of obstructions. The stock cooler will surely fit comfortably in this space.


The C2D 775 socket.

The DDR2 sockets are fairly closely spaced but with such limited space there would quite honestly be no other way of doing this. Certainly not a major issue at all.


DDR2 slots are tightly spaced but useable.

The mainboards 24-pin ATX socket is neatly placed below the DDR2 slots and most importantly the locking clip side faces away from the ram slots meaning there should be no issues removing it when DDR2 is installed.


24-pin ATX socket should be easy to use.

The 12v mainboard socket is also placed well out of harms way.


The story is the same for the 12v - plenty of room.

The PCI-E 16x slot is located at the side of the motherboard. It's quite close to the two SATA II sockets but as the locking side of those SATA's is on the other side there should be no issues when it comes to the removal of SATA plugs. The only slight issue for the PCI-E slot is that the card release lever is surrounded and consequently obscured by the lower SATA socket and the two DDR2 locking clips. This could prove tricky if you wanted to remove an installed GPU while both DDR2 slots and the lower of the two SATA sockets were populated.


Installation of SATA plugs should be easy but PCI-E users might have problems.

The GeForce 9300-ITX WiFi is dominated by the large northbridge heatsink. Though despite its size it manages not to interfere with any other component on the board. Hopefully, considering its size, it will also cool the chipset sufficiently well.


The large Northbridge heatsink doesn't interfere with other board components - thumbs up from me!

Around the back of the board we see a fairly standard layout. 6x USB sockets, a PS/2 keyboard socket, an E-SATA slot, both an optical and coaxial digital output, the obligatory analogue audio inputs and outputs and a VGA and DVI socket too. An unusual addition (although more boards are sporting them these days) is the 'HTPC friendly' HDMI socket.


An excellent selection of connections including HDMI.

Finally, i must mention that there are also three sets of headers for extra USB breakout plates. One if these headers is required for the supplied WiFi adaptor so with this is mind you'd only be able to have a maximum of 10x USB connections with it installed. Only 10! I remember the days when 2 was the most you'd find!!!

Well, all that seemed fairly impressive - let's see how it does in real life.