PCB Design

Well, if I can say it about a mainboard then here it is: this mainboard is beautiful. The black textolite goes very nicely with the light-green components (they shine in ultraviolet light): AGP, PCI and DIMM slots, IDE and FDD connectors, the battery case. This mainboard looks like a unique thing. Of course, its looks will make it appeal to the modders.

The cooling system of the chipset is both good and bad. Yes, the high-profile passive cooler with a plenty of ribs on the North Bridge should provide efficient and noiseless cooling, while a heatsink on the South Bridge is more than enough (many manufacturers don’t mount any heatsink onto the South Bridge chip at all). On the other hand, you usually buy a top-end mainboard to overclock it. In this case, the North Bridge would feel much better if it had an active cooler on. The passive heatsink on the South Bridge could have been larger, with more ribs, too.

There are some more minor remarks about the component layout of the PCB. The 20-pin ATX power connector is placed correctly (the attached cable doesn’t hang above the CPU cooler), but the 4-pin connector is not. The CD-in and AUX-in connectors are close to the uttermost PCI slot. Many users don’t use them, but if you do, you will have to run the cables through the entire case. The placement of the FDD and IDE connectors is questionable, too. I think it would be better if the IDE1 connector were at the bottom of the PCB and the FDD – in the middle. This change would allow an ideal placement of the cables, ensuring better airflow inside the case.

However, these are all minor inconveniences compared to the real problem that you are likely to encounter when installing the mainboard with the CPU and cooler already on. The problem is that the CPU socket is too close to the left edge of the PCB. This makes it difficult to fasten the leftmost screw and also limits your choice of coolers: a big cooler may just not fit onto the mainboard. Although there are four mounting holes for massive coolers on the PCB, you are unlikely to use them…

One COM port was sacrificed to make enough room for the S/PDIF connectors. You may consider this no great loss (ABIT ships its MAX series mainboards without any LPT or COM ports at all). However, many users still use devices like a COM mouse or a serial external modem. If you discover that you lack a COM port, you will have to change your peripheral, I am afraid. They might have placed a COM connector onboard, or at least add a bracket with a COM port to the accessories. For example, this is what we see in 8RDA3 mainboards from EPoX: the back panel of the mainboard doesn’t carry COM or LPT ports, but you can get 1 COM and 1 LPT port by installing the bracket included into the mainboard package. If necessary, you can buy one more bracket to implement the second COM: there is an appropriate connector onboard. The DFI engineers didn’t do anything of those: no onboard connector, no second COM port.