Layout
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Examining the layout from left to right, top to bottom, reveals that the K8NS Pro has a well thought out layout, that shouldn't trouble anyone looking to use the board in any well designed ATX chassis.
The auxiliary ATX12V supply connector is the first notable board feature, located at the top left of the board above the 3-phase CPU power supply componentry. The CPU socket area is next, Gigabyte not doing anything to impinge upon the defined socket area as expected. Oriented west-east, the socket shares the same optimal orientation as the ASUS board.
Three DDR-I DIMM slots let you have up to 3GB of installed memory, with the two 250-supplied ATA ports, the floppy port and the main ATX power connector sat past those on the right edge of the board.
The 250-supplied SATA ports sit just above the AGP slot, the normal place for them on 250 boards. The AGP slot uses a decent retention mechanism, better than the usual latch, but not perfect either. Like all other nForce3 boards, the single ASIC that makes up the core logic sits high up on the board's bottom half, next to the first few PCI slots. It's covered by a heatsink and fan combo that thankfully doesn't add much to the noise in your system, barely registering that it's even spinning, in terms of extra noise you're likely to hear.
Gigabyte sensibly place the extra USB port connectors on the right hand edge of the board, where they are most likely to be connected to front-mounted ports on your case. The IT8212F GigaRAID ASIC is left of those, with the ATA ports it drives just underneath. They could be placed a little better elsewhere on the board, but they're not too far away from being ideal.
The SATA ports driven by the Sil3112 are underneath those, on the bottom edge of the board. They're in as good a place as they're going to get on the K8NS Pro, given the placement of the rest of the components on the board, but I do wish board makers would place them on the right hand board edge, as close to the disks they'll be connected to as possible.
A decent layout given the components on the board, but not perfect.
