Closer Look:

The most obvious feature you may have noticed looking at the board is the Silent OTES copper heat pipe cooling on each chipset and PWM components. This is some serious cooling pipes that help reduce any need to use chipset cooling fans. Stock aluminum can cool pretty decently alone, but by itself it doesn't dissipate heat quite as well as copper. If you haven't been keeping up on the PWM components as of late, the temperatures can get pretty hot reaching 60 C during operations. Aluminum wouldn't be so quick to cool these temps or handle more serious attempts at overclocking due to the heat produced by the PWM controller. Some extra air blowing on this particular area would be very useful as well.

Front

Back

Next obvious feature is the newly standardized three PCI Express slots. Two of the slots operate at 16X each for the total 32X as mentioned in the motherboard's name and the third PCIE slot is an 8X. This third slot is intended for another graphics friendly peripheral such as the Physx Graphics cards. These cards add a bit more detail and features that remove some of the CPU burden by taking care of the operations itself. For example, some games will have extra things such as smoke, particles, and detailed objects that may otherwise be left out automatically by your system. Most users won't notice things like this. But, avid gamers who like the best picture and performance will love running their system with two graphics cards and an extra Physx Card for a better experience.

Bottom

Top

The IN9 32X-MAX has a pretty clean layout. I rarely ever find the need to harp on any particular detail like this since there is just too many other components that easily take precedent. The location of ports and power connections are pretty decent and uncluttered. There is a great deal of thought always put in to many motherboards which is the case here. There are standard and 90-degree SATA ports which are actually useful these days due to crowding with more and more storage in today's systems. Another great feature is the inclusion of two eSATA ports at the rear of the motherboard between the SPiF and Audio ports.

Lower Half

Front Panel Connectors

Plenty of Connectivity

Next to the eSATA ports is an idea new to this test bench. The idea is meant to replace and provide an alternative of having to open up your case and clear your CMOS. We've all set something in the BIOS that just wouldn't work and have had to clear it. This idea I speak of us a CMOS Switch. All you have to do is simply move the selector to the left for about 15 seconds which clears your CMOS. Then you simply slide it back in to its default position and reboot. Of course, you will also have to set your BIOS options back to your personal settings.

EZ-CMOS for Clearing the CMOS/BIOS

The Front Panel Connectors are placed at the bottom of the board rather than between DIMM sockets or data ports like some other 680i platforms have done. And all around there plenty of onboard USB expansion ports if the ones on the back of the platform aren't enough. As I said before, only when a much needed and commonly used connector is placed in a position that interferes with the function of the motherboard will I bother to give it a bad mark. This board is devoid of any convincing issues, so it gets a good mark in this regard.

Angled SATA Ports

DIMMs, Fan Ports

RealTek 7.1 HD Audio

Alas, one of the final and best features which seem trivial to those who may read this are the use of solid state capacitors. Previous generation capacitors are still very abundant and find their way on to non-flagship motherboards here and there. Often it takes many, many of these to give a motherboard its best chance of overclocking and sometimes, stability. Solid state caps are much more efficient with less chance of break down or fluctuations in voltages. These also provide the latest motherboards the best chance of excellent overclocking and stability success. The IN9 32X-MAX has many of these which it needs with all the of the power requirements to the many ports and PCI-E power hungry components.

Copper

Heat Pipes

Extreme Cooling