The layout is rather good. Despite the huge amount of the onboard connectors you will have no problem with access to it and even will be able to install long PCI-card in the only PCI-slot. The functionality is really impressive! Literally it is hard to find such a combination of the legacy ports like LPT, 2 COMs and 2 IDEs and the contemporary SATA, DVI, HDTV, S/PDIF In/Out on the ordinary Full-ATX board. So you can assemble your main home PC or the media center on this board as well as embed it into industrial equipments or even your car's elbow-rest like the guys from  TweakTown.

Using Socket 754 might seems slightly obsolete, but in reality the energy-thrifty Semprons look like logical choice. The performance is high enough as our test shows but the price is nearly lowest that you may find for the high-performance CPU itself (VIA's family and AMD Geode may be cheaper but much slower). And by the way Socket 754 will outlast Socket 939 in production, CPUs for the first AMD64 socket will be shipped until midyear while the Socket 939 family have already replaced with the Socket AM2.

Because of the outstanding functionality you might think that the chipset hardly stays cool during the system runs under heavy load. You are right. In fact the board should not be used with a fan-less heatsink installed on the CPU. In our tests the chipset overheated pretty soon when the CPU was cooled through heat exchange by a water-cooling system. This problem can easily be avoided if you choose the retail (box) version of the CPU, shipped with the appropriate cooler. As you can see on the pictures, the fins of the CPU cooler orientate in parallel with the chipset's heatsink ones. Because of the generous airflow, This circumstance has a magical effect on the chipset temperature. Just now you have had a chance to get your fingertips burned and all at once you can feel the heatsink is nearly cool. Sadly this is causing another annoyance because Albatron forgot to implement any fan control functionality into the BIOS, the fan rotates audibly at full speed all the time, so the noisy box cooler is not the ideal choice from this point of view. Therefore we suggest to spend some time for searching a proper cooler from Titan, Glacialtech or other well known brands with a silent fan and similar heatsink in order to get the best result.