Motherboard Layout:



The first thing that I noticed was the location of the ATX power connectors, they are situated right in the middle of the board, the worst location imaginable, as they sit between the CPU and AGP port, it’s a guarantee for a cable mess. If you are using an after market CPU cooler and VGA cooler then those cables will be squeezed in tight. Moving the power connectors to the side of the board would resolve this.

The IDE and SATA ports are situated at the side of the board, which is very good. The ULi chipset is cooled by a small passive heatsink (with thermal pad), its very low profile, so fitting larger AGP cards won’t pose a problem.



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The memory slots are way up the mainboard, this can possible pose a problem when using a large 3rd party CPU heatsink, as it will hover over the 1st ramslot, however I tested it with a Zalman CNPS7000-CU and found that there was enough free space to fit 2 ram modules without issue.

The back plate of the A64 mounting bracket is not glued on and can be removed easily, quite a plus if you want to use an exotic cooler which needs its own back plate.



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Time for some steaming action, overclocking & benchmarking ->