Gadgetory

all right so today I've got another age 55 board this one is for masseuse and the first thing that you can tell about it is that design matters this is a replacement logo for the one that they have on their whatever it is extreme something or other that includes USB 3.0 whatever it's a similar looking logo and basically what they're saying is that engineering is important which it is from other boards because if it's not engineered well it won't work very well okay so this board also includes HDMI DVI GPU boost ddr3 2133 support that's pretty cool for like a micro ATX entry-level board and turbo v it is Windows 7 ready it supports LGA 1156 socket CPUs and that includes core i7 core i5 and core i3 so there we go that pretty much covers that here they've got a quick Oh actually this is kind of neat ok so instant IGP you level boot level up so they take the integrated GPU in real time and boost it for the best graphics performance so if you actually care about the graphics performance of your onboard CPU on the core i3 or Core i5 dual core then this is how you will be able to take advantage of it it also has a turbo key which allows for easy it's an overclocking button ok alright ok well why don't we get this thing open and we'll have a have a quick look at it so this is a pro board so it's not one of their most basic oh I'm losing accessories here you know what give me just like two seconds I'm gonna go ahead and adjust my camera down so you can see what I'm doing here you know what I might even use the zoom today check that out so you'll be able to see better Wow how about that ok then I have accessories so inside we will find two SATA cables one straight and one right angle then we will find one IDE cable now seriously personally I would rather see another couple SATA cables because how many people are really using IDE drives with the needs of these days alright then we got an i/o shield then we have a user's guide which also includes a DVD that has all your drivers and whatnot don't use any of this download the latest officers comm and you will be able to have a much better experience out of the blocks with the latest drivers alright and then we have the board itself in a Seuss's eco friendly all paper packaging there's no phone there's very little plastic actually so I'm going to go ahead and go wrong way wrong way it's hard to operate a camera from like the front of it not ideal alright so I don't see any mention whatsoever on this board for crossfire support to be perfectly honest but I haven't actually checked to see if it does support it so hopefully I'll figure it out at some point to make an annotation but let's have a look at the general layout of the board so first of all you've got two PCI slots one PCI Express 16 slot and one PCIe one slot this is kind of my ideal configuration for a micro ATX board these days because really if you're going to be using a single slot GPU even if yeah even if you're using a single slot GPU you're going to want to leave the next slot open so it has some room to breathe so this way you can use a PCI Express and a PCI and then you can also use a video card in it if you want you've got a few USB 3.0 scuse me you at 3 USB 2.0 headers alright then you've got six SATA ports which is I love that I love how so how so many lower end boards these days are coming with more SATA ports you can also see that even though this looks like kind of a random layout for them it's not random at all because here's your PCI Express graphics slot and here is the space that would be taken up by a dual slot GPU so they've got it positioned so you can conveniently make use of these even if you have a long graphics card installed you got an IDE port on the side here and then you have your 24-pin power located in its ideal location along the right-hand edge they've got their wow I can't believe they didn't call this out on the box because I've seen it on every other box that has this they have their easy one sided Ram instantly I don't know I don't remember what this is called but basically there's only a clip on the one side the other side this side doesn't actually have clips so you see there they're shaped kind of different so all you have to do is you you put the RAM module in this one and then you open up the clip put it in and then clip it in on the one side so it's kind of different that way alright then you've got your LGA 1156 socket which supports core i3 s core i5s and core i7 now this is an age 55 board so means you've got onboard video including HDMI DVI and VGA but the bad news is that the onboard video is not on the motherboard it's not actually in the chipset it's in the CPU so if you put in a CPU that doesn't have onboard video then it won't work so you have to use a core i3 dual core or a Core i5 dual core in order to take advantage of the onboard video just something you ought to be aware of all right so then we've got an eight pin power connector which is quite surprising to see on like like I said sort of a it's kind of a hybrid like it's either value or its high-end it's kind of both okay they've got their cool fortress of solitude style of MOSFET cooling here I really like this I can't even I can't even explain why and then on the back panel let's have a quick look here I mean I know I kind of showed it to you but let's have a better look so you've got a ps2 port looks like it's keyboard only but it might work with them else I have no idea normally those ones are color coded green and purple then you've got six USB ports these are all USB 2.0 you've got HDMI like I said won't work without the onboard GPU then you've got optical audio out you've got a couple more GPU outputs again they don't work without an onboard GPU you've got Gigabit Ethernet and 7.1 audio so thank you for checking out my click on boxing of the asou Speas Evan H 55m pro