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The layout is fairly standard. As usual, we'll start at the top left and move right and down and comment on interesting features of the layout. The first thing we hit is the CPU socket area, flanked on the left by the power regulation circuitry, the socket has plenty of room around it and it passed the Swiftech test with ease allowing me to use my MCX-462 on the board without any issue. Beneath the socket is a solitary capacitor which gets close but doesn't foul the MCX-462 so any large 80mm sink should fit OK barring major disaster.
Moving right past the socket we find the 3 DDR DIMM slots that support DDR266 (PC2100) DIMM's for a maximum board and chipset support of 1.5GB of main system memory. I'll cover TwinBank mode in a bit more detail later in the review so look out for that.
Moving down near the DIMM slots you can see the ATA100 controllers provided by the MCP, oriented vertically, an alignment preferred by this reviewer for todays tower cases. Carrying on we see the fanless, passively cooled heatsink on the SPP-128 bridge which means a good airflow in your system is beneficial. Saying that, the sink never got hot at all during testing, even under load and it passed the finger touch test easily. I have very little case ventilation so it did well.
One thing to note was the northbridge sink broke free of it's clips during transit to me for review and was floating free in the anti static bag the board arrived in. While the board wasn't damaged by the free floating chunk of black aluminium, it did let me notice that the sink used a nice even smear of thermal compound between sink and bridge, somethat that some companies miss out for whatever reasons (cost most likely).
As usual with boards these days, from the north bridge down, everything is standard as far as layout is concerened. The RAID ports are in the bottom right corner, aligned horizontally and coloured bright yellow. It's the only aesthetic enhancement (if yellow is your colour) the board makes concession too and it's certainly not the prettiest of boards. Just how pretty a PCB can be is a matter of taste however!
ATX power connector placement isn't sited in the best of locations and may require you to route the cable round the CPU socket area so this is something to look out for depending on your case. Not ideal, but better placed than some boards we've seen!
Installation was a snap, just remove the old board in the test chassis, install the NV7-133R, screw it down and install the peripheral cards. Just as it should be. The board had no problems with anything I installed in it, again, just as things should be.
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