Board examination
The RS485M-M has a confusingly similar name to the RS482-M, but we reckon we can just about cope with that. So is the board itself similar?
ECS purple returns, so yes, it does look similar. However, it's not without its distinctions.
Here the AM2-style heatsink-mount is visible. There's no additional cooling installed on the power circuitry for the CPU. At the bottom of the picture is the red CPU fan header, with four pins. At the end of the line of capacitors is the +12V 4-pin power connector; not in the best of locations.
There appears to be room by design for four DIMM slots, but only two are present on the board. We're not entirely sure why this is so. It would have been nice to see a full contingent of DIMM slots for maximum upgradeability. The 24-pin ATX connector is on the edge of the board, along with the IDE and floppy drive headers (just one of each, which seems to be the way of the motherboard world now).
The SATA ports, while grouped together, are quite amusingly arranged, with one - perhaps the ugly duckling - pushed aside by another of the board's components. Ironically, with a lengthy graphics card installed into the PCIe slot, it is that connector which is the most accessible.
Presuming that no installed card takes up more than its own slot, there's room for two PCI cards, a x16 PCIe card and a x1 PCIe card. The x1 PCIe connector is positioned such that a regular dual-slot graphics card can be installed and there'll still be access to one PCI and the x1 PCIe slot.
The board layout is generally OK, particularly in the expansion slot area. There are a few annoyances though, like the +12V connector position and the susceptibility of the of the SATA ports to graphics-card blockage.
