Features:
Intel X58/iCH10R
6-phase VRM
ISL6336 VRM controller
Broadcom BCM8756 PCIe Gb LAN controller



Marvell 88SE6320 SAS controller



ITE IT8720F super I/O controller
Realtek ALC888
ICS 9LPRS139AKLF clock generator
passive cooling of chipsets/VRM
8Mb BIOS, version: P13
Mainboard Revision: 1.00




Slots:
2x PCIe 2.0 x16
1x PCIe x4
2x PCI

Memory:
3x Triple-Channel DDR3-slots for PC3-12800U memory up to 12GB

Storage:
6-Port SATA II featuring RAID 0, 1, 5, 0+1, JBOD
1-Port PATA




Backpanel ports:
1x PS/2 keyboard
1x Gb LAN
8x USB 2.0
7.1 analog audio
1x optical audio out




Accessories:
1x Audio card
4x SATA cable
2x SATA with HDD-power to SATA connector with power
1x SLI Bridge


This board offers quite a few suprises. The first one are the godawful SATA connectors. They are of extremly poor quality and face the wrong side. Using latching SATA cables will not result in a satisfying "click". On the other hand this board is the only one with a Broadcom GbLAN chip and a Marvell 88SE6320 serial attached SCSI controller, features common on workstation boards.

The  layout is also quite unique. It features two PCIe x16 and two PCIe x8 ports, but using two-slot graphics-cards, the ports will be rendered useless. At least the PCIe x4 slot will be available. 

In contrast to the Flaming Blade GTI board, this board clocks exactly on the spot.






Overclocking:

Using our i7 920 and setting BCLK to 173MHz; CPUz told us 174.7MHz which is quite high and mystery. How hard can it be to program a clock-generator correctly? The BIOS reports low voltages for the VCore and instead of entering absolute values, you can only change relative to the VCore.  The i7 975 did take lots of TDC and TDP upping, but worked fine. But as you can see compared to the screenshots above, the VCore is higher and we did not change a bit.