ASRock N7AD-SLI

Examination:

While the ASRock N7AD-SLI motherboard boasts a fair number of features, there is nothing radical about its design -- there are no elaborate cooling solutions or anything unique compared to other brands or even other ASRock motherboards. In the upper right hand corner of the motherboard PCB is the 24-pin ATX power connector along with four DDR2 memory slots. These DDR2 slots support up to 16GB of DDR2-800/667 memory.

In the lower right hand corner of the motherboard are six Serial ATA 2.0 ports, one IDE ATA-133 connector, CMOS battery, and VIA IEEE-1394a Firewire controller. The six SATA 2.0 ports are provided by the NVIDIA nForce 740i SLI Chipset and are capable of running in RAID 0, 0+1, 1, 5, and JBOD configurations.

The expansion slots on this motherboard include two PCI Express x16, two PCI Express x1, and two PCI slots. This motherboard is SLI compatible, but there are not PCI-E x16 lanes going to each of the two PCI Express x16 slots. Due to not enough bandwidth from the nForce 740i SLI Chipset, this motherboard is like the very early SLI motherboards that had the paddle to provide PCI Express x16 support to one slot or PCI Express x8 to two slots. However, with the N7AD-SLI it's PCI-E x16 to one slot and PCI-E x8 to the other. Below the expansion slots is the FDD connector.