Layout and Aesthetics

The board itself is wide, and it has no less than 11 screw holes, using every single ATX mounting point. This is definitely one motherboard that will not flex as you install cards. The surface of the board is a glossy black colour, with the traces coloured a very dark brown, so dark you can hardly see them. With the massive no nonsense passive Northbridge cooler, and the standard colour scheme for the slots and connectors, this is a very professional looking board.

The layout is well thought out, with the 20 pin ATX connector and the parallel IDE connectors put on the right hand edge of the board, helping to minimize cabling clutter. The 4 pin 12v power connector is on the opposite side of the CPU area to the PSU, and forces the cable to cross over the top of the CPU fan. I found that with my short PSU leads, and the open framed Intel Heat Sink, it was easy to get the cable caught in the fan. The other layout complaint is that even a fairly short AGP card will get in the way of the retaining clip on the first DIMM slot. This could have perhaps been resolved by moving the DIMM slots up a little. The rest of the layout is good, with fan headers for the front of the case, another header just above the AGP slot, and a temperature controlled case fan header for the case exhaust or PSU. The USB and Firewire headers are at the bottom of the board, out of the way. The CD audio in connectors are also right at the bottom of the board, which means the cable will have a long stretch to reach the CDROM drive. The oversized northbridge heat sink gets a draught of air from the CPU cooler, and didn't get more than slightly warm to the touch.

Usability

This board is an engineering sample, and as such came without a manual. I did however get a quick reference guide with the board, which said on the first page "this guide is written for technically qualified personnel with experience installing and configuring desktop boards." This guide was 25 pages long, and explained the installation in such detail that anyone with a smidgen of common sense could install and set up the board. If this guide is any indication of what the documentation that comes with the retail board will be like, then it is safe to assume it will be straightforward and easy to follow no matter what your skill level. The only non-obvious feature of the board that came to my attention, was that you must press f2 to enter the BIOS setup, rather than the "normal" delete key. This isn't really a problem, but did cause a few moments of confusion.

Driver and software installation was a breeze, the CD autoruns, and gives you a useful menu where you tick all the components you want, and it even gives you an estimate of how long it will take to install everything, and even how many reboots will be required. Intel have obviously gone out of their way to make this board user friendly, but without compromising flexibility.

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