Board Layout
The board is generally fine, layout wise. SATA connectors are on the board's edge, expansion slot positioning means you get the use of one PCIe x1 slot and two PCIc slots even with dual-slot graphics cards in SLI. ECS put one IDE connector on the board's right hand edge (bottom as you look at it), and all the other I/O headers and ports are where you'd expect.
The board falls down in the power connector placement stakes, though. While the main 24-pin connector is in a near perfect spot on the edge of the board, the 4-pin ATX12V and PCI Express graphics slot power connectors are suboptimally placed for clean cable routing. With the CPU socket area located over to the left, getting the ATX12V cable around it either way is a pain when integrated into most chassis' that we can think of.
A fairly standard two-chip layout for an LGA775 mainboard with just a couple of bad placement choices to spoil it.
And while the heatsink and fan combo on the C19XE chip isn't overly loud, we generally shake our heads in dismay when a board vendor chooses a 40mm fan and heatsink combo to cool a mainboard chip. Invariably the fan is cheap and therefore gives us concern over long-term use, and we have those concerns with the C19-A SLI, sadly. It's possible to passively cool C19XE, so we'd rather ECS did so.
The backplane gives you PS2, four USB2.0 ports, parallel, serial, digital audio out (coax S/PDIF and Toslink) and analogue 8-channel output, with the sole GigE port to finish. BIOS next.