Layout
Our usual layout talk, top-to-bottom, left-to-right. The first thing we come across is the voltage regulator for the CPU socket, giving the CPU its Vcore allowance. The socket sits centrally in the area between the ATX port cluster and the memory slots. There's generous space on the left and right sides of the socket itself, but clearance below is poor. It failed my Swiftech MCX462-with-MCX478-brackets-permanently-attached test and bizarrely, there was no real room for my simple Spire air-cooler either. The bank of capacitors on the south side of the socket fouled the angled side of the cooler, which isn't that big. It's no different to the 2.0 Deluxe in this regard, so ASUS had plenty of opportunity to get rid of that layout faux pas since May 2003.
There's plenty of room from the right edge of the socket to the memory slots. They are colour coded for TwinBank dual-channel DDR operation. Like 2.0 Deluxe, slots one and three are the recommended slots for TwinBank running. While dual-channel DDR is of questionable benefit on Socket A Athlon XP systems, the bridge provides the facility and you may as well make use of it.
Past the memory slots we have the ATX power port, floppy drive port and the pair of IDE ports. They're in exactly the same place as on 2.0 Deluxe, so again we point a finger and ask why the layout wasn't tweaked here. Moving the ATX power port and floppy ports up the board towards the top, giving room for rotated, edge-bound, IDE ports would have been desirable. You know the type, featured on K8V for the floppy port and recent ABIT boards for the IDE ports.
The nForce2 Ultra 400 SPP bridge sits in the same place as before and happily features the same fat aluminium cooler as before too. A passive, silent solution, it served 2.0 Deluxe well so no change in this department is a good thing, silence is golden. That marks the top half of the board out nicely, onto the southern section from the AGP port down.
Despite adding the WiFi port, ASUS resisted temptation to move the AGP slot a notch higher up the board. This means that it stays comfortably away from both the SPP heatsink, giving you clearance for extravagantly cooled graphics cards and it also keeps itself away from the tab ends of the memory slots. You can swap memory modules easily, without removing the graphics card, on 2.0 Deluxe and it's the same layout with -E Deluxe, thumbs up for ASUS keeping the positioning static.
There's nothing else changed on the lower half of the -E Deluxe, bar the addition of the WiFi port underneath the last PCI slot. The MCP-T bridge remains uncooled and in the same place as before. The Marvell ASIC for the gigabit Ethernet support sits where the older PHY for the 3Com MAC sat on 2.0 Deluxe and doesn't affect layout. ALC650 to process the analogue Soundstorm signals (why oh why wasn't ALC658 used?) sits in the same place, Sil3112 too. The A7N8X 2.0 Deluxe didn't have the best layout in the world, some tweaks could have been made. I'd have liked to have seen them worked out, lazy ASUS.
