The top-down shot of the board shows off a pretty great colour scheme. You really can't go wrong with black, grey and red. There's also a lot of heatsink surface area, suggesting this board will run quite hot.
Power needs are supplied by a single 8-pin ATX connector, with the power delivery for the CPU socket mostly cooled by this angular aluminium heatsink. There's a heatpipe running through the base of it that joins all three heatsinks together.
There are certainly a lot of pieces that go into making one of these systems, and ASUS describe it as an "8+2 phase CPU power design". In other words, plenty of power for even the most overclocked of CPUs.
The AM3 socket is pretty standard, though it sits a little close to the DDR3 slots for comfort. Large heatsinks may interfere with the two leftmost DDR3 slots.
Strangely these slots are coloured like you would expect on a P55 platform.
Storage options are limited to six SATA3 ports powered by the SB850 Southbridge chipset, while there's a single black vertical SATA2 port that is powered by an onboard chip (the other SATA2 port is routed to the Hybrid USB/eSATA on the rear panel).
The Southbridge is cooled by a large Republic of Gamers heatsink, which is actually a shade lighter than the blood-red colour it looks here.
Along the bottom of the board lies buttons for Turbo Key (auto-overclocking switch), Turbo Unlocker (ASUS' neat core unlocking feature), a Start (power) and Reset button.
The ASUS product page suggests that this chip is a "SupremeFX X-Fi", which "delivers an excellent high definition audio experience". Well, it's not anything better than your average chip, and we peeled off that aluminium cover to find...
A Via VT2020 chip! While this is a great onboard chip, it's nowhere near amazing. The plate was held on with adhesive, and doesn't need to be messed with unless you're particularly curious.
Four 16x PCIe slots work with Crossfire in dual-card mode at dual 16x bandwidth, and in triple-card at 16-8-8x.
Finally, the 890FX Northbridge chipset, cooled by a large heatsink. Keep your eyes open for the full review in an upcoming Issue of Atomic, and also look out for AMD's new six-core Phenom chips!
The top-down shot of the board shows off a pretty great colour scheme. You really can't go wrong with black, grey and red. There's also a lot of heatsink surface area, suggesting this board will run quite hot.