The blue socket to the left of the floppy port is a standard 4-pin molex connection that's required for the board to operate.

Erm, isn't that the primary IDE channel?

Hehe i was just going to post this to….
Just bought the motherboard and without a doubt , the writer must have been on drugs :crazy: when he wrote that…hehehe:mrgreen:
It´s the IDE channel.

And where the sweet Jesus Christ is the SATA2 port? I was probably going to buy one of these for my own box, to replace my Bad Axe, until I saw that. And it's not just the review sample. I note we didn't make any mention of it, either, other than to say it just has 3 ports on the spec page.

What's the reasoning behind it?

After some weeks use of the motherboard , I must say that it works fine but has a limited slot places for hard drives, with 4 SATA ports it´s just not enough for me.The other black SATA ports only works in RAID thats not helping me with 8 SATA Harddrives so i bought a controllercard for more slots. I think the review doesnt state the limited amount of harddrives i can plug in…..which wasnt good atleast when i have loads of them.
Anyway it is beside that a very good MB. Will probably change for a nforce 590 Intel Edition as soon as they are released at the market.

Good luck with the nVidia Intel SLI edition :crazy:

Tbh I have the board and yes it has a few quirks, but it is a decent board with a helluva lot of features. I don't like the RAID/non RAID implementation on the board at all - my NF4 was far easier to select drives as RAID and non-RAID - with this board you don't seem to have this option really :(

I have a non-RAID SATA drive as a main OS drive and a (non SATA 300) 76gb RAID array. I have had to put the RAID array on the Asus “Easy” ports. The trouble is that the drives don't perform over SATA 150 speeds, which they used to on my NF4.

Like I said: a good board that has it's quirks