Elitegroup Computer Systems recently announced their addition to their ATX motherboard family with the NF650iSLIT-A LGA775 (or the 650i if your keeping score at home). The 650i has tremendous external connectivity with support for 10 USB devices, along with gigabit LAN connections.

Also included with the 650i is two PCI Express x16 slots, arranged in a user-friendly x8 by x8 configuration. The 650i is a power house of connectivity. Enabled to be connected to four serial ATI II’s, three IDE devices, and three PCI legacy slots, despite the need for them. If your looking for eSATA slots you’re out of luck as thats one of the only things the 650i won’t house. — Andrew Dobrow

Product Page [ECS]

The external hard drive market has done fairly well lately, but there has always been that problem of the USB 2.0 speeds. USB is fine when transfering a few photos or the likes, but what about when you want to move gigabytes of movies? USB just doesn’t cut it. The new Western Digial My Book drive integrates what is called external SATA technology to defeat these speed problems. The drive is able of reaching bursts of up to 300MB per second; that’s 5x faster than the USB burst speed of 60MB. The drives are selling for $179 and $229, and come in capacities of 320 and 500GB. If you are looking for a super fast external hard drive, this is it. –Nik Gomez

Western Digital rolls out My Book drive with eSATA [via Electronista]