Connectors and I/O

Unlike the GA-7PESH1, there are only two SATA3 ports, additionally you'll find four SATA2 connectors. They are all located at the bottom right of the board. There are also two mini-SAS headers that provide up to eight additional ports. The SAS ports are provided by an LSI 2008 controller, which has been connected to the chipset using eight lanes. Therefore there is plenty of bandwidth for high-performance RAID setups. On the GA-7PESLX you will also find two full size PCIe Gen3 x16 slots (not spaced by one slot this time) with two PCI Express x8 ports working at x4 (one port is Gen3 while the other one is Gen2) and one PCI Express Gen2 x4 expansion slot. Furthermore there is an ASPEED AST2300 onboard 2D video chip that provides a VGA connector without the need to a third party graphics card.

Totally you'll find six fan headers on the Gigabyte GA-7PESLX which are three more than on the GA-7PESH1. This is more than enough for a workstation motherboard because usually workstation fans are directly connected to the power supply. Anyway you will find one cpu1_fan as well as one cpu2_fan located not far at the right of each cpu's power design and a sys_fan located next to the socket 0's power plug. The other three system fans are located upper the LSI SAS Controller on the right side of the motherboard.

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. The third LAN port is a management port.