Asus' P5B-VM motherboard
The G965 Express arrived at my Benchmarking Sweatshop riding Asus' P5B-VM motherboard. This board is currently selling for between $90 and $138 online, and it's a pretty typical budget Micro ATX board.

With few onboard peripherals to worry about, the P5B-VM's layout is quite roomy. We do wish Asus had put the auxiliary 12V power connector up along the top edge of the board, though. That position would reduce cable clutter around the socket and rear chassis exhaust, and the power connector wouldn't have to be any farther away from the socket.

Even with a 667MHz integrated graphics core, the G965 Express makes do with a relatively modest passive heatsink. The entire board is passively-cooled, so it won't add to overall system noise levels. You won't have to worry about a tiny, whiny chipset fan succumbing to premature and sudden failure, either.

A low-profile heatsink on the south bridge leaves plenty of clearance for longer expansion cards, and the SATA ports are even low enough on the board to avoid conflict with double-wide graphics cards. Note that there are only four SATA ports, though—two of the ICH8's six ports are left untapped on the P5B-VM, and we just hate to see wasted potential.

From this angle, you can also see that the board's lowest expansion slot, a PCIe x4, is an open-ended slot that should be able to accommodate longer cards. Don't get too excited about running a pair of PCIe graphics cards, though. Although the slot can handle longer cards, the motherboard battery bracket gets in the way.

There's one more Serial ATA port on the backplane, this time of the eSATA variety. This port is connected to the board's auxiliary JMicron JMB363 storage controller, which also powers the IDE port and an additional internal SATA port.

Note that, despite the G965's support for both DVI and HDMI output, the P5B-VM has just a single VGA monitor output. Budget integrated graphics motherboards tend to cater to low-end systems, and DVI and HDMI outputs apparently aren't a priority for those segments. Digital S/PDIF audio outputs didn't make the cut, either.