Board Layout
There's not much the board does wrong, layout wise, either. With double-slot coolers on a pair of graphics boards you'll lose use of one PCI Conventional slot and the PCIe 2X slot, leaving just two PCIc and the PCIe 1x slot that sits topmost on the board.
Power cabling can be routed round the edges of the board for a neat integration, main IDE (from the ICH7R) is on the board edge, the ICH7R's SATA ports are clustered near that IC (passively cooled, as is the i975X northbridge). The Marvel disk controller sits near the bottom two PCIc slots with its 4 SATA ports and sole IDE ports not far away, under the ICH7R.
There's the standard space around the LGA775 socket for heatsinks, the DDR2 DIMM slots sit vertical and board edge-biased and it's all largely hunky dory. I'd maybe get rid of that extra Marvell-attached IDE connector full stop (although I'm a SATA whore these days, granted), and we found the primary graphics card hard to remove due to the caps and inductor near the slot, but that's it I think.
Both ASIC heatsinks are passive (and the southbridge one short to save fouling any graphics board in the bottom PEG16X slot), case headers are well labelled to save a trip to the manual and the extra IO pins for header cables are all along the bottom edge of the board. Winner.
Backplane wise the main points are dual networking (both PCIe-attached GigE, nice), eSATA (wired to port #4 on the Marvell controller) for external disk enclosures and the audio connectivity from the ALC882M.
It's a fine layout all in, one befitting something suitably high-end. BIOS next.
