On the next few pages we'll show you some photos. The images were taken at high-resolution and then cropped and scaled down. The camera used was a Canon 450D 12 MegaPixel.

Alright, let's take a look at the product. Here we have the entire bundle. The product is under the sub-100 USD market, and in fact you can pick it up real cheap at 79 USD already. Typically the motherboards manufacturers therefore skimp a little on the little extra's. So next to the motherboards you'll receive the backplate, driver CD, 2x SATA cables and a Parallel ATA (IDE) cable. That's not at all bad really.

Hey now .. look at all the slots and connectivity .. can you believe this is a budget motherboard? It even comes in the UD3 flavour, meaning the board has all solid capacitor design with high quality parts from Japan.

Also lower RDS MOSFETs, ferrite core chokes and lower ESR solid capacitors are used here. Ultra Durable 3 takes it up a notch and by using even better Japanese capacitors, said to last for 50,000 hours (almost 6 years of continuous use).

The biggest hype about UD3 is actually the fact that they now use two ounce copper layers in the PCB. This should lower temperatures inside the PCB, and that boils down to better lifespan, stability and overclocking. But enough on UD3, let's check out the motherboard a little more up-close and personal.

So here we have the back panel connectivity. Immediately I'm impressed. We spot the PS2 mouse and keyboard connectors, then (and I love this) coaxial and optical TOSLINK sound output, a total of 8x USB 2.0 ports, firewire, a Gigabit Ethernet LAN connector and then the 8.1 channels of analog audio as well.

When we flip the board 90 degrees counter clockwise we spot socket AM3. Check out the ferrite core chokes on the right by the way. Also we indeed spot the HQ  Japanese capacitors. This board is going to last us a long time.