Connectors and I/O

Overall, there is on this board just two SATA ports that are attached to the bottom board. There are also three SAS headers that provide up to twelve additional ports available. The SAS ports are provided on an LSI controller, who was tied with eight lanes to the chipset. This gives enough bandwidth available, so that high-performance RAID array can be set up. On this motherboard you will find two full PCIe x16 slots spaced by one slot to mount a dual graphics card setup for computing. Further, there are two PCI Express x8 ports and one PCI Express x4 expansion slot. For the PCI Express x16 slots as well as in the x8 slots Gigabyte releases by this server board PCI Express Gen 3. Also useful are the two PCI Express x8 ports that provide more than enough bandwidth, so even the latest high-end SSDs in these slots can fit.

Totally you'll find three fan headers on the Gigabyte GA-7PESH1 which is more than enough for a workstation motherboard because usually workstation fans are directly connected to the power supply. Anyway you will find one cpu0_fan as well as one cpu1_fan located not far at the right of each cpu's power design and a sys_fan located next to the LSI SAS Controller.

Looking at the external connectors directly at the back-panel, Gigabyte equipped their worksation motherboard with four USB2.0 ports, no less than three Ethernet LAN ports, a COM connector and of course the video out (VGA) for the ASPEED integrated graphic chip AST2300.