A closer look


motherboard details, click to open

On the first thumb you can see the bottom section of the board, with one of my favorite features in the center: motherboard on/off and reset switches.. On the left of the power switch you can see the IEE1394 "firewire" header, while on the right the three USB headers. At the right hand side of the board you can see the six SATA ports, which are all angled ones, pointed towards the front of your case, where the hard drives are placed most of the time. To the right of the USB header, you'll find all the case connectors which can be used with Asus' Q-connector kit. The Q-connector is nothing more (or less :) ) than an easy way to connect your case cables to your motherboard. Instead of fiddling about with the different cables, you connect them to the Q-connector first, and afterwards just plug the Q-connector upon the motherboard.

The second thumb shows us the memory slots: four memory slots for a maximum of 8Gb on board ram. At the bottom of the picture you see the 24-pin power connector, and the connector for a floppy drive, which still finds its way onto the board (I wonder for how much longer...)

The third thumbnail details the CPU area: the board provides enough clearance even for extreme cooling like phase change, or Liquid Nitrogen. No digital PWM's are present yet, but there are as much supporters as adversaries for this latest feature. There are no traditional capacitors for the PWM area any more though.

On the fourth thumbnail we have a look at the motherboard back panel slots: Asus has decided to drop the PS2-connector for the mouse (something which actually was a pain for me personally, as I use a KVM switch with PS2 ports, but that's reviewer's stuff of course ;-) ),instead of the PS2-port Asus has added two extra USB ports for your mouse, and an extra external device. The most interesting part of the back panel is the center part however. Where you would expect to find the audio ports, there's not much more of a gap with a heatsink, connected to the PWM heatsink, and a tiny new but very welcome feature: a bios reset switch. This way you'll be able to correct an overclock that has gone right without having to pen your case, and unplug several things in order to reach or find that bios jumper... Way to go Asus! The missing Audio parts finally are of course not missing, but provided on an external card that plugs into your motherboard.

The last thumb provides a look at the dual PCIe slots, physically sized as x16 slots, but electrically they're x8 speed. This is perhaps the greatest feature of the Blitz lineup : unlike the competing P35 boards, which only provide one x16 slot (both physically and electrically), Asus decided to go with two x8 slots, providing dual graphics, cross-fire capabilities to this board. For the current generation of graphics cards, x16 slots speed offer little or no advantage over their x8 speed counterparts, so in this way Asus' decision can only be applauded.

Finally let's have a look at the so-called "Fusion block" :



The fusion block is the north bridge cooler assembly, which as you can see, provides possible water cooling out of the box. Be careful though, as only the "Special Edition" Blitz Formula and the Blitz Extreme provide this northbridge sink, the "normal" Blitz Formula does not. To answer your question whether this water-cooled block provides any advantages over a normal block, I have to say however that I could not measure a difference. Of course, temperatures were much lower with a water-cooled chipset, which will no doubt have a favorable impact on its life-expectancy, but overclock wise I did not see any improvements over the air-cooled assembly.


Time to have a look at the bios next...>