The 8S655FX Ultra is very well laid out. It seems like Gigabyte's engineers were thinking about the end user when they designed this board. For instance there's enough space between the AGP slot and Northbridge to install those larger after market GPU heatsinks like the Zalman ZM-80A HP, and you can remove the memory without having to first take out the videocard.

I was really happy to see that Gigabyte included a secondary Ultra/133 IDE RAID controller (GigaRAID IT8212F). Too many manufacturers these days are neglecting to include them on their motherboards. This is a shame since regular IDE HDD's are much more common than Serial ATA HDD's.

With the ever increasing multimedia power of PC's, and many IEEE 1394 audio/video devices, it's nice to see that Gigabyte was able to include two IEEE 1394 ports as well.

Many integrated motherboards have onboard options that lack the accompanying brackets. While the 8S655FX doesn't include every single option, Gigabyte did include most of the brackets to take advantage of all the onboard goodies.

Newbie users need not fear using the 8S655FX Ultra as the board is extremely well labelled. Every header/jumper has a description and if you still don't know what something does, Gigabyte has one of the most detailed users manuals on the market. Just for the heck of it, Gigabyte also includes a RAID users manual which shows you how to build RAID array's.