Layout
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Nearly one thousand pins, wrapped up in a supplied retention mechanism and heatsink area, to the right of three-phase power. The same Fairchild FET parts that we saw on K8V get the nod here too. Just above the power circuitry we have the main 20-pin ATX power connector. It's just about perfect placement on an ATX board in my opinion, depending on the chassis that will hold it.
Opteron and Athlon FX support means four DIMM slots for the dual channel memory controller. 2GB DIMMs can be used in each, supporting up to 8GB of memory in total. They are colour coded to denote membership on a particular controller. I used the blue slots throughout testing but you can use either, if you're only using two DIMMs. Past them we have ATA ports that are hung off the VT8237 bridge.
ATX 12V aux power is underneath the socket on the left, near the audio ports. It's not the best placement for it, but at least it's on the left, allowing you to route the cable down the side of the heatsink area and not over the top. Passively cooled K8T800 bridge is next, using the same slim blue aluminium cooler they use on K8V. During testing the heatsink was lukewarm to touch, even when overclocking. The heatsink marks the north-south board split.
The VT6307 is left of the AGP slot, which has an annoyingly fiddly retention clip that's hard to get purchase on when you're trying to remove a card with a decent sized heatsink. The ASUS 9800XT I use is never easy to remove from either K8V or SK8V. Something akin to what Albatron use would be nice on future boards.
The 3C940 Gigabit LOM is to the left of the yellow PCI slots. I'm a closet fan of the dark chocolate PCB and yellow slot aesthetic. Make of that what you will, amateur psychoanalysis never hurt anyone. The VT8237 doesn't get a heatsink and doesn't need one, keeping the board pleasingly silent.
The two VT8237-connected SATA ports are stacked to the right of the bridge they're connected to, followed by the edge-oriented floppy port. I bleat on about how it's great, my opinion hasn't changed. Moving further down that right hand side we hit the Promise PDC20378 ATA/SATA controller and its connected ports. East-west ATA and a pair of SATA ports underneath are what you get. I prefer north-south for ATA ports.
After that, it's stock layout all the way, with ATX case headers, headers for the USB and FireWire ports you get in the box, plus the voice chip that drives the sexy POST monitor girl that coos at you via your speakers on bootup. CPU fan failed.....mmmmm.
Five PCI slots (with WiFi port under PCI5) means that AGP is sufficiently far away from the memory slots, such that changing your memory configuration is possible without having to remove your graphics card, always a good thing.
