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Page 2 of 3
A closer look
The first thing that stands out are the heatsinks cooling the northbride and VRMs. They look like copper but are actually made of aluminium. The 2 sinks are linked with a heatpipe. ASUS have tried their best to make this board competely silent without sacrificing cooling, and the heatpipe is a good indication. The southbridge is sinked with a simmilarly coloured aluminium heatsink.
Looking around the socket area, you can immediately see the 8 phase power regulation which should translate into greater stability whilst overclocking. This also means that it should have no trouble running kentsfield. However, it can be seen that in the centre of the socket, there are a few spots left without any capacitors. We've seen other motherboards which have all these spaces packed. It looks like ASUS have skimped out on a few de-coupling capacitors which could translate into minor RF spikes. Although this would have minimal effect on clocking, shortcuts like these shouldn't be taken on a high end motherboard that costs a bomb.
The bundle is very comprehensive indeed, with no less than 6 booklets, a driver/utility CD and a booklet/CD case with the media launcher disc which can be used with the included remote.
The best is yet to come - you're really spoilt as far as accessories are concerned. An IR remote control and receiver to control your computer is included, which should prove useful for listening to music and watching videos. If that wasn't enough, an antenna is inluded for use with the inbuilt Wi-Fi on the motherboard. Apart from that, there are a host of other, more common accessories such as SATA, IDE and floppy cables, PCI brackets with USB and firewire ports and a I/O shield. ASUS have thoughtfully included an optional fan to be used with the heatpipe cooling system. This will be useful for those among us who use water cooling or phase change, as without any air circulted by a HSF, the heatpipe sink can overheat.
There is no doubt that all the included "creature comforts" will be useful to quite a few people, but we can only guess what these must have added on to the retail price.
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