In this corner we find two PCI Express x1 slots, three PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots (blue pair for SLI, all three for three-way SLU) and one 32 bit PCI slot for legacy devices. Along the bottom edge are Firewire and USB2.0 headers.

A passive heatpipe heatsink covers the nVidia nforce 570 SLI southbridge chipset. Below that is the CMOS battery, I/O and USB headers. The six Serial ATA II ports are mounted at right angle to reduce cable clutter with longer videocards installed.

Since this is the nForce 780i chipset, there are four DDR2 memory slots that can accommodate up to 8GB of DDR2-1066 memory. To the right are the floppy, IDE and 24-pin main ATX power connectors. The teal-blue header is for a COM port. Between the DDR2 DIMMs and LGA775 socket is the Asus EPU chipset.

There is plenty of space around the Intel LGA775 CPU socket for big after market Intel heatsinks. A fan is included which can attach to the MOSFET heatsink in case watercooling is used.

As you can see here Asus uses heatpipes to move heat away from the hot chipsets to the larger MOSFET coolers. The heatpipes are kept low on the board so as not to interfere with any of the larger videocards or peripherals.

Asus Stack Cool is a special technique used on some ASUS motherboards to help cool down BGA chipsets by conducting some heat into the PCB itself.