We have a view of the socket area, excellent clearance space , large 3rd party cooling solutions should encounter no resistance here!  From this picture we can also see the 8 phase power design of the board. Very impressive lineup of solid capacitors too !

The underside of the board, large Asus Stack Cool 2 logo there, together with an enhanced backplate for the chipset for added strength during vertical mounting of the board!

A generous array of I/O ports, including 6 USB, 2 gigabit, SPDIF and 7.1 Audio ports ! Note the droppage of the P/s2 Mouse port - seems times are a' catching up on the venerable P/s2 port ! With the introduction of more and more keyboards and mice with native USB connections, it really hard to justify the need for a P/S2 port for mice!

The chipset is cooled by a large and extensive copper-piped heatsink - with the option of having supplied optional fans mounted at distinct intervals of the chipset to enhance cooling.

Neatly stacked SATA ports , with support for 2 IDE devices provided by a single ATA port powered by an external Jmicron controller.

The main attraction folks - the Dual PCIE 2.0 x16 slots in navy blue !