Board Layout 

With this board you'll have support for the entire line of processors manufactured for the socket LGA 775 with front side bus speed support available from 800Mhz all the way up to 1600Mhz.

The DDR2 spec starts at 667 and caps out at 1200Mhz. Even though you won't find any official specifications for DDR2 operating at that speed, there is still plenty of non JDEC spec memory manufactured that can operate well beyond 800Mhz, and do so with rock-solid stability. Around the DIMM sockets you'll find the 24-pin main ATX power connector and the (one step away from totally useless) floppy disk connector. There's also a 3-pin power header for a power supply fan and a 4-pin power header for the CPU fan.

The ICH10-R provides 6 discreet channels for SATA devices. Since this South bridge has been tagged with the "R" you can expect RAID services. Gigabyte integrated the Sil 5723 controller with the EP45-DQ6 which adds a single PATA channel and additional SATA channels that can also support RAID. As you can see from the pictures, some of the SATA connectors are positioned off the edge of the motherboard. The ICH10R native ports are colored yellow which leaves the purple connectors for the integrated Sil5723 controller.

Here we can see the rear panel multi-input/output panel with four Gigabit Ethernet ports and four stacks of two USB 2.0 ports. The USB ports make up one of the six "Quad" setups that pedestal the EP45-DQ6. All of the audio ports have been included on the I/O panel so you won't have to give up an expansion slot to have full surround sound. You've also got an optical and coaxial SP/DIF (digital) sound output. As an oh by the way, there are PS/2 style keyboard and mouse hookups as well.