Well it has come time to rip this box open and see what we have to work with. Below is the way the box looked when I got it. ASUS has been doing a great job of making there boxes flashier

When you open the box you are blown away with everything it comes with. If ASUS keeps including more things with there motherboards there going to need bigger boxes. Starting from top left you get Motherboard, IO-Backplane, Serial ATA cables X2, IDE floppy joystick USB COM 2 port, 1394 Header, Manuals, 1394 cables for header, Driver & utility CD.

Taking a look at the motherboard the first thing you might notice is that ASUS has changed the standard ATX backplane to make room for the dual LAN, Dual USB and 5.1 sound. If you look at the middle picture below you will see a red light between the AGP port and first PCI port this light lights up when you put a video card in that will not work with the board. I put an old SIS AGP card in the AGP port to test it and the light works.

For the most part I love this motherboard, however, there where a few problems I had with it. First off, I didn't like the joystick header placement. Its right near the front of the motherboard near the front panel header and you have to stretch the ribbon cable all the way across the bottom of the board to reach it. Also I didn't like where they decided to put the serial ATA connecters. They're all the way at the bottom of the board. I could see problems running hard drives in the top of a full tower case with the provided cables. The last problem I had with this board is the lack of an optical ribbon to plug in to the Optical header. This motherboard has the header for the optical audio out but it did not include the ribbon to use it.

Well now that we have taken a look at the board lets see what it can do