Board Layout:
Now let's take a look at the Pro board, starting with the ports. Mostly common I/O ports, 4 USB ports, an RJ45 port, audio ports, PS2, etc. If that's not enough USB ports to get you by, they also include a few extras that can be installed in the back of the case.
Now let's move down a little to the PCI slots. Here we see what makes this board special, two PCI-Express x16 slots. Between these two slots there is the SLI mode jumper. In order to enable SLI on this board, the SLI portion of the jumper must be inserted in the proper orientation. This is easily done by a few locking levers and just turning the jumper around.
Just above the expansion slots you may have noticed two small chips (lower left). One of them is labeled Gigabyte Dual BIOS, another nice feature by Gigabyte that allows for some extra stability. Also located next to the expansion slots is the chipset, covered by a 24 karat gold heat sink (lower right). Okay maybe its aluminum, but it is gold colored. I would have preferred to see a fan cooled heat sink to keep this chip cool while overclocked, and Gigabyte was asked why they chose to go passively cooled here. Gigabyte intentionally went without a fan on this chipset cooler in order to "prevent potential future fan failure and lower acoustics". Fair enough, but a highly overclocked system might benefit from a bit of a breeze in this area.
Now let's take a look just above the chipset. Located here are our four DIMM slots; unfortunately they are packed a little close together for some RAM. I had a little trouble fitting my set of OCZ EL DDR PC3200 Dual Channel Gold (
reviewed here) because of the large heat spreaders. After some effort I did get it to slide in without ruining the RAM or the board.
