Introduction
We are going to take this one in another direction (perhaps a little in reverse with a bit of the end at the beginning). At first glance, this board does not seem to be worth the money and we want to clear the air a little about what most people may not (do not) need.
Well what is it that may not be needed?
1. 8-pin ATX 12V power connector is not needed for the average user. Better to have a good power supply feeding clean power.
2. More than 6 SATA ports. Most users have one or two drives plus the optical storage. High end users may have a RAID installed but almost nobody uses more than 4 ports (6 on the outside).
3. 20 USB ports are great but how many do you actually use? Mouse, keyboard, 2 gaming devices, web cam and printer/scanner. So that is 6 and modern cases come with front mounted ports so we will call it 8. No real need for 10-14 rear connections. USB 3.0? It is only necessary for a few types of devices. It is a necessity on a modern board but just not every port.
4. As much as I love all those switches, buttons and test points the average user does not need them. Want yes; but need? Unless you are a bit of an enthusiast… no.
Well, to be clear here and take care of doubts about performance first we went over to HWBot. For those who do not know about HWBot:
HWBot is a dynamic team of international hardware fanatics as well as internationally recognized overclockers, dedicated to gathering specifications and benchmark performance results of computer hardware as well as serving a non-stop overclocking competition platform for amateur and die-hard overclockers. You can use HWBot to compare processor or graphics card specifications, to compare the performance of different products using the HWBot Hardware comparator which gives people a more balanced view on the overclocking capabilities as well as the performance of hardware in comparison to one-man based reviews.
The last sentence hurts my feelings a little but it is necessary and that is why I do try and include HWBot links in my work. To peak interest in the board, that appears to be underpowered and run of the mill, I did make a few posts on the Bot and came out to the good and of five of the tests submitted the following points and ranks were won:
PC Mark Vantage Global 4x CPU rank: 47
9.2 total HW Team Power Points
47.2 total Global Team Power Points
3.2 total Hardware points
So now that that part is out of the way we hope that your interest has been peaked and we will continue and you may be surprised what was used to get those marks.
