Board Layout
Being a mainboard that supports all LGA775-socket Intel microprocessors, the PA1 MVP Extreme follows a layout similar to the vast majority of other ATX form-factor LGA775 mainboards on the market today. Starting at the top left, you can see ECS supply a fan and shroud to direct air outside of your chassis from the FETs and other power regulation circuitry near the processor socket. While switching and regulating the power supplied to the CPU from the ATX12 socket in the very top left of the board, those components can get very hot depending on CPU load. Actively cooling them in some way is therefore a very good idea.
The CPU socket area itself isn't encroached on by any components and the board accepts all LGA775 heatsinks that follow the official socket spec. To the right of the socket area you can see the fan header for the CPU heatsink and the four DDR2 DIMM sockets for up to 4GiB of main system memory. The PA1 MVP Extreme supports a variety of memory speeds up to DDR2-667. The Radeon Xpress 200 Crossfire Edition core logic supposedly supports DDR2-1066 memory officially, although that speed step wasn't available on the BIOS revisions for the board during testing.
The main ATX power socket sits in good position on the right hand edge of the mainboard. The next items of note are the 4-pin Molex connector for input power to the PCI Express slots and the Radeon Xpress 200 Crossfire Edition northbridge sits not far away. Cooled passively by a fairly large heatsink topped by a Crossfire sticker, the bridge is a cool runner even in full Crossfire mode; the heatsink got warm but was always touchable throughout all testing.
A Realtek ALC880 audio CODEC chip lies to the left of the first PCI Express 16X slot and near the audio connector ports that it does I/O for. A PCI Express 1X slots sits between the aforementioned 16X slot and the second one needed for Crossfire, a further 1X slot rounding off the board's PCI Express connectivity. A pair of PCI Conventional slots approach the bottom of the mainboard, each a different colour for some reason.
Realtek get networking duties too with a RTL8100C 10/100 Ethernet chip on the PCI bus, a Marvell 88E8053 supplying GigE connected to the PCI Express bus. The ATI SB450 Southbridge is passively cooled by a small black heatsink which never got anything more than lukewarm to the touch during load testing. The chip - among other things - provides the main disk controller and you can see the four SATA ports and two IDE ports that it's responsible for nearby on the right hand side of the board.
The chip also gives the board 8 USB2.0 ports, four ports exposed on the backplane and four available using attachable headers supplied with the board. A VIA VT6307 gives the mainboard a pair of FireWire 400 ports for use with FireWire peripherals. Headers for a parallel port and USB sit alongside the headers for the VIA-powered FireWire ports.
Finally, a pair of SATA2 (with NCQ) ports are connected to a Silicon Image Sil3132 chip which sits on the PCI Express bus, connected to the SB450. RAID is supported by the mainboard by the ATI SB450 bridge in both RAID0 and RAID1 modes.
