Layout
Looking across the board, starting from the top left, we firstly come across the CPUs power circuitry along with the ATX12V connector, before moving on to the CPU socket itself. Just underneath this socket we find the RX480 northbridge for the motherboard, covered by a chunky heatsink. We can then see the motherboards four DIMMS, colour coded to denote which slots to use for dual-channel operation. From here, we can see the motherboards IT8712F chip for hardware monitoring, followed by the floppy connector and main 20-pin ATX power connector.
Down towards the middle of the board now, we see the various LED and power connector headers, sat next to the two IDE interfaces on the board. Next to this is ATI's own IXP 400 southbridge, as well as Via's VT6307 chip to enable Firewire support. We can then see the boards various slots, consisting of five standard PCI slots, a single 1x PCI Express slot and a 16x PCI Express slot for the video card. Sandwiched next to the PCI-E 1x slot is Realtek's RTL8100C network controller, and towards the edge of the board we also find their ALC655 audio chip.
Finally, down at the boards bottom right, we find the headers for Firewire ports and additional USB 2.0 ports, as well as the four Serial ATA ports provided.
Generally speaking, the positioning of all the components on the board is good - Everything leaves you with a reasonable amount of space to work with, so you shouldn't find yourself having issues with cables blocking slots or the like. My biggest gripe would be the placement of the sole 1x PCI Express slot on the board - If you are using a PCI Express video card with a large heatsink and fan, the PCI-E 1x slot becomes inaccessible. This wouldn't be such an issue if there were more than one on the board, but with only that single slot available the implications for potential connectivity are greater.
Checking out the board's backplane we find, from left to right, firstly the ubiquitous PS/2 ports for keyboard and mouse, followed by a single Firewire and two USB 2.0 ports. Next up is the parallel port and SPDIF sound output, before we find a gap where the VGA output would be were this a Radeon Xpress 200 chipset minus the 'P' notation, and thus including on-board graphics.
We then come across the 10/100Mbit network connector, above another two USB 2.0 sockets. The plate is rounded off with three audio connectors for, from top to bottom, line-in, line-out and microphone.
