Asus GeForce 9400 Hybrid SLI Intel motherboard

Bit Tech photographed an upcoming motherboard for the Intel platform from Asus that features Hybrid SLI support. The Asus P5N7A-D/SAS features the GeForce 9400 chipset and has the Express Gate feature which allows you to quickly boot into an Internet-friendly Linux environment, according to the sticker this takes just 5 seconds. Another giant sticker and the name of the motherboard suggest this board also has Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) support.

What’s interesting is that the GeForce 9400 chipset appears to be a single chip solution – this has some benefits when it comes to saving space on the board and as a result, there’s a fairly interesting board layout.

Despite being a full-ATX design, the board only features a single PCI-Express x16 slot, but because of this it does feature three PCI slots and a couple of PCI-Express x1 interconnects. There are six SATA connectors and an IDE socket, which is rotated 90 degrees along the edge of the board.

In addition, the memory slots are also pretty low down the board and will be very close to resistors on the back of longer graphics cards, although it is unlikely to cause a problem. Finally, the 24-pin ATX connector is bizarrely placed right next to the rear I/O panel, which means you’ll have to run cables across the board.