ECS NF650iSLIT-A Motherboard Review :: ECS NF650iT-A Layout

The layout of the board has its good points and bad points. The first thing I noticed was the positioning of the 4-pin power connector. This is positioned behind the CPU cooling area on the top of the board. The power cable had to be snaked over the CPU cooler, meaning that airflow might be an issue. A much better positioning would be on the top right hand corner as many newer boards sport.

Northbridge

Fan Headers

USB headers

The positioning of the PCI Express x16 slots is interesting in comparison to the position of the SATA ports on the board. First thing to notice is the spacing is convenient for a two-slot PCI Express video card to be installed. On many boards, a long PCI Express x16 card like the GeForce 8800GTX would cover the SATA port directly under it. ECS decided to separate the SATA ports and offset them so that the 8800GTX length card would not interfere with the SATA port, meaning that it is an excellent position for them.

I'm not sure that I like the positioning of the IDE connectors. These are positioned on the far left of the board meaning that long IDE cables might have to be used in conjunction with a full-tower ATX case. After all, the computer builder today would use the IDE connectors for DVD Optical drives not for HDDs. Optical drives are usually on the top of the case and the full tower case will mean that the IDE cable has to snake from the top to the bottom of such a case.