Nerd detective
I was watching Green Wing, a British hospital comedy, on Hulu when I saw this guy carrying around a motherboard. It was nothing more than a prop in the scene, but it had me fascinated enough to try and find out what brand and model of motherboard it was. There's no prize for figuring it out, other than the satisfaction of knowing that my nerd sleuthing skills are still sharp. The CPU socket looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn't remember if it was Socket A (Athlon), Socket 478 (Pentium 4), Socket 754 (single channel Athlon 64), or Socket 939 (dual channel Athlon 64). Two sets of two memory slots usually indicates dual channel, so I ruled out Socket 754. The square orientation of the northbridge means it's not an nVidia nForce2 chipset, which was, for my money, the only dual channel Socket A chipset, so I ruled that out.
Then I realized that the organization of the RAM slots wasn't like the standard for dual channel, so I was back to square one, with 4 possible routes to look down. I focused on the CPU socket and, after browsing a few pics, determined it was a Socket A. So I looked for Socket A motherboards that had the same color northbridge heatsink. I narrowed it down to around a dozen choices that were all very similar, but it was the blob of letterson the heatsink, which is all but invisible in the above screengrab, that led me to the answer. "Elitegroup" distributed the ECS-K7S5A motherboard you see below, and it's a miracle I could find it at all.
Back when I was all about AMD, I kept up on all the chipsets, but the nForce2's features and performance made it supreme in my mind, so every other chipset was easily forgotten. This motherboard's chipset was the SiS 735, and with support for both DDR and SDR RAM (hence the two pairs of differently colored and keyed RAM slots), making it a transitional board not unlike the ones we see today sporting both DDR2 and DDR3 slots. This allowed a budget-constrained upgrader to ease into an upgrade with a faster chipset and CPU, while retaining their old memory for a while longer. If you're reading GD, this is probably stuff you're well aware of, but I found it interesting to remember how things used to be and realize how some things never change.