The Basics:
The image below provides an overview of the ECS GF9300T-A Black Series motherboard provided for review. The color combination has become the standard for Black Series products, and the contrast of the black PCB and brightly colored connectors, coolers, and slots is rather striking. Another thing that may catch your eye is that ECS has printed random bits of technical data on the board in white letters. Terms like "Giga LAN", "FSB1333", and "Hybrid SLI" jump out at you as reminders of the boards capabilities, even if they make you wonder why they are there.
The board has an interesting layout from a component positioning perspective. While the orientation of the CPU socket to the memory slots and chipset heatsink looks fairly normal, other items aren't positioned as you might expect to find them. The six bright orange SATA headers caught my eye because they are lined up parallel to the expansion slots, and not particularly close to the edge of the board. Speaking of the expansion slots, there are two PCI Express x1 slots, one PCI Express x16 slot, and three PCI slots. Since PCI-E x1 devices are still fairly uncommon, what it looks like is that there will be an abundance of room between the CPU heatsink and the video card. Now when you install a video card with a two slot cooler, you'll be blocking a PCI slot, instead of a PCI-E x1 which might be going to waste anyway.
The next two images take a closer look at the board in the area surrounding the CPU socket. There seems to be plenty of wide open space for oversized heatsinks, and the only potential obstacles are the orange chipset heatsink and a second black heatsink located between the CPU socket and the I/O connections. Neither heatsink is particularly tall, and neither is very close to the CPU socket, so I do not anticipate any problems with mounting a CPU cooler. Extra power is provided to the CPU via a 4-pin connection which seems to be rather remotely situated beyond the top edge of the black heatsink.
 
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