PCB Design

This mainboard leaves an impression of a reliable product. The CPU power circuit is a three-phase one with huge induction coils: the wire is really thick even according to the mainboard standards. A small heatsink is mounted on a transistor, which is a base for one of the supply circuits (evidently, for the chipset). It’s no secret that the supply circuit transistors of modern mainboards heat up a lot, so it definitely made sense to use a heatsink here. Especially, since the transistor we are talking about was really warm during work.

This touching concern about a single transistor could imply that we would see a huge cooler installed onto the chipset North Bridge. However, the North Bridge of the chipset has no active cooling. It is no secret that nForce2 Ultra 400 generates less heat than the “older” nForce2. And even nForce2 often came just with a passive heatsink.

As for design layout, it’s good overall. The cables that go to the USB and FireWire connectors won’t interfere with the expansion cards or hinder airflow. Parallel IDE connectors are grouped in pairs and placed at a distance, so that you had no heap of IDE cables to mess up with. IDE connectors are taken to the front of the PCB, so that the IDE cables don’t hinder proper airflow even if you use traditional cables (not the round ones that come with the mainboard). The installed graphics card doesn’t block the DIMM slot clips. The DIMM slots themselves are set at a distance, so you will have no problems with memory modules equipped with heat-spreaders.

It seemed like everything was excellent, but we still found a drawback. The main (20-pin) ATX power supply connector is shifted to the front part of the PCB and the power cable has to go all the way through the system case. Moreover, this connector landed before the FDD connector. Thus, the FDD connection/disconnection has become no trivial task. Maybe the designers just had place for this connector in its usual location, which was now taken up by the CPU power circuitry components. But at least they might have put it down behind the FDD connector.