The evga 650i Ultra 775 A1 Motherboard Review
Board Layout
As you take your first glance at the board, you can see how clean it is, a lack of features does leave a little bit of room on the board! This board is a Nvidia reference layout, so what you are seeing will likely be a very common layout, if not the only one you see on this board.
The top left of the board is where we see our Dimm slots. This board supports up to 8GB of DDR2 memory in Dual-channel configuration at speeds of 533/667/and 800 ddr.
As we noted, this board does not support SLi memory mode, that is one of the features that was removed. Just to the right of the dimm slots we have our 24-pin power connector, located in a great spot at the edge of the board. To the left of the dimm slots, we see the beefy heatsink on the Northbridge. This sucker did get extremely hot during testing and overclocking. Some new thermal paste and fan would certainly help out in the overclocking of this board.
The bottom right of this board is where we find our lone IDE connector, placed correctly at the edge of the board. Just to the left of the IDE connector is where we find our SATA connectors. These connectors are powered by the Nvidia chipset, and are SATA2 compliant. They also support RAID in flavors of RAID 0, 1 and 0+1. Just to the left and under the SATA ports, we have out Clear CMOS and Bios chip. Under those, we have our floppy connector, and in the very bottom corner, we see our front panel I/O connections.
Right in the middle of this part of the board is where we find the southbridge, take a closer look…
As you can see, this thing is bare… no heatsink at all, and this baby gets HOT!!! If you get this board and plan to overclock, you will certainly want to check into some type of after market cooler. If you notice, the holes are already there, so adding a cooler will not be a problem.
The bottom left of the board is where we find out pci and pci-e slots. This board only sports one pci-e, a cost cutting measure which means this board will not run in SLi. if want that ability, you will need to look at one of the other boards in this family. There are two x1 pci-e slots, as well as 3 legacy pci slots. We also find our audio here in this area.
The audio on this board is powered by the Realtek ALC885, and provides 7.1 HD audio.
As you look at the board, you will also observe that there is only one LAN port on the board. It is powered by a Gigabit enabled Marvell chipset.
The top left of the board is pretty barren. It houses the CPU socket in the middle of this area. it also is home to our 8-pin 12v connector, which is located at the top left of the board. This is a prime position for this connector!
The back I/O port area also looks very barren. We have our PS/2 ports, our four USB ports as well as our LAN and audio jacks. That is all! Let’s look at the bundle and bios!
Comments are closed.