The VIA Fire IIM VT6308S 1394 Host Controller takes care of the Firewire interface:



Near the center of the board, we can find the Marvell 88SE9128 SATA 6GBps Controller:



The two SATA3 connectors are also located near the controller:



The Southbridge is covered by an interesting looking heatsink with the ASRock logo on top:



On the right side of the PCB, we can find 6 SATA ports and an IDE header; near the IDE header we can also find the clear CMOS jumper along with the battery:



Near the memory slots, we can find another USB 2.0 header and the front panel header:



The memory slots are near the ATX 24-pin power connector and are color coded differently; if we do have only 3 sticks of ram, the right way to plug them is in the white slots; if they would be installed in the blue ones, the system won’t boot:



On the upper part of the PCB, we can find two more fan headers along with the inscription that this motherboard is Gulftown CPU ready:



In the top left corner, the ATX 12V 8-pin connector can be found, along with the PS2_USB power jumper and the CPU fan header:



The 8-phase VRM does have a revised cooling system compared to the older revision and this time features active cooling:



The VRM cooler connects to the chipset heatsink with a single heatpipe:



The X58 chipset cooler looks the same like the one from the X58 Extreme, only colored differently. During load, it gets pretty hot:



From left to right, we can find the following I/O panel ports:

PS/2 mouse and keyboard port

a CLEAR CMOS button (very useful in case the system does have a failed overclock and we do not want to open up the case to reset it by jumper)

an optical/coaxial SPDIF out port

a USB 2.0 port along with a powered eSATAIII/USB 2.0 combo port

4 more USB 2.0 ports

a Firewire port

two USB 3.0 ports along with the LAN RJ-45 port

the audio ports



After installing the CPU cooler (in this case a Cogage True Spirit), we can see that there is plenty of space between the fan and the first memory slot, so even tall memory modules would fit: