Layout

Positions

Taking a look at the CPU socket, we’re fairly pleased that there is a decent amount of room around the CPU for heatsink clearance. There are some close calls on the inside edge and side nearest to the keyboard connector. But most any heatsink should fit onto this board. Having a good amount of space around the socket is rather crucial for any of the more hardcore cooling solutions.

Power connector

The one thing we didn’t appreciate too much was the position of the ATX power connector. Having it reach over the CPU grates on us a bit. The majority of you have tower cases, which means that the power cord is going to loop under the power supply and sort of coil above the CPU fan exhaust unless you cable tie it out of the way. This isn’t a large problem merely a gripe.

Drives

All the drive controllers are pretty much where we expect them to be. The floppy and IDE controllers are in line right next to the RAM slots. This is essentially the defacto standard in the placement of these ports. Every now and then someone strays from this convention for no good reason. In a regular tower case these ports lineup almost exactly at the same height as the drives themselves. In a mid-tower you case you can essentially get your cables down to a few inches and be fine.

The RAM area

The RAID controllers lie towards the bottom of the board and that suits us just fine. There really isn’t a set place to have these. The extra drives, depending on the case can go just about anywhere. Cases like the Antec 1030B have numerous drive bays at the bottom of the case, lining up with the RAID controllers perfectly.

AGP slot

Many boards have been released with the AGP slot far to close to the RAM slots. This generally results in the user having to remove the video card in order to add or remove memory. The slot on the KT3 does look a bit close, but there is enough room to squeeze the memory in and out of the slots without having to remove the video card.

One of the larger scandals of the moment seems to be the AGP spec. Epox released a board that doesn’t allow for the Ti4600 to fit into slot because of the tall capacitors around the slot. For kicks, we pushed a Ti4600 into the KT3 and were pleased to find out that there were no problems with size constraints. We were worried that one of the smaller capacitors might get in the way but there was enough room for all of them to coexist peacefully.