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Starting at the top left, working our way from left to right and top to bottom, let's have a look at the layout.
The first thing to hit you, and probably the biggest eye catching feature of the board in isolation, is the gigantic triplet of mosfet heatsinks. Leadtek make a big deal of the 3-phase power solution on the board, squarely aimed at tweakers and overclockers, and they've made sure all that power circuitry is cooled as well as possible.
We then come across a north-south Socket A arrangement, with plenty of room around it. My bastard son of satan heatsink, the Swiftech with permanently attached P4 brackets, fits perfectly. There was even room to avoid fouling the ATX power connector. Obviously that means the board is well equipped with the mounting holes needed for such monstrous lumps of metal, good show Leadtek.
Before we hit the memory slots on the top right of the board, we have a metal effect logo stuck to the board, denoting the model name of the board. As you can see in the shot, it reflects bright light in a pleasingly wide array of colours, but under normal, non-flash ambient light, it looks metallic. Yet another reminder this isn't a cheap motherboard you picked up for £40 from a computer fair (if you do actually pay that for one, at a computer fair, get one for me too, thanks). The memory slots are confusingly colour coded, just like the ASUS who's features the Leadtek apes. The coloured slots don't share a memory controller as I'd like them to. Like the ASUS, run DIMM1 and DIMM3 for optimal TwinBank operation with two sticks of memory.
The ATX power connector sits in a fairly awkward part of the board and is the only bad part of the layout. The top edge of the board is the best place for this, but we can't really complain. Unlike the ASUS, Leadtek thinks active cooling is best for its Ultra 400 solution, and with 3-phase power and an obvious tweakers bent, this board is likely to be overclocked so we can't argue. The fan isn't noisy, thank your chosen god for that. There's nothing worse than a noisy 40mm northbridge annoyance to really spoil a board.
A red AGP slot with retention mechanism marks the top-bottom split. Why red Leadtek? Black please, the red spoils it. 4 white PCI and a blue slot for the ACR are the only other awkwardly coloured components on the board. How cool would all black, with the flashes of silver on the heatsinks and logo, be? Sadly, we can but dream.
The southbridge gets a hat to wear on the Leadtek, a natty little silver heatsink keeps things cool at the utterly stock clocks it will run at. But, the MCP-T gets notoriously hot, especially on boards that let you adjust chipset voltage, like the Leadtek, so it's all good. I don't think it's possible to run any clocked component on the southbridge, out of spec. PCI clock and USB clock are all fixed, running off seperate timing loops than the northbridge.
The last things to talk about are the IDE ports and the floppy port, on the bottom right. I don't like them down there if at all possible, but at least Leadtek don't orientate them wrongly, wrongly being horizontal. The tiny SATA ports sit right at the bottom of the board, along the bottom edge. That's probably the best place for them until PATA ports get removed totally. SATA cables aren't that long however, I think 1 metre is the limit, so as close to the right edge as possible please, if any motherboard layout engineers are reading.
Want to gawp at the massive mosfet heatsinks some more? Want a voyeuristic peek at the ports?
They really are massive, even if my shoddy photography skills don't really show it.
It's about time we got to the benchmarks, here's the system setup.
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