Actually if anyone care to really look the picture closely, that one memory slot next to the PCIe-16 is a bit too close to comfort to me.
Also after I saw the other boards in the family, I kinda felt that Asus had not put much effort into the design of this board. I mean if they basically just cut down the memory slot and by doing so reduce the overall footprint of the board.
Personally I would rather see they drop that hardware (RAID?) controller that add those extra SATA ports on the bottom left, and instead use that spot for the SATA ports provided by the chipset, and since from the looks of things they have dropped both floppy and IDE connector, they can move the chipset (assuming the chipset is indeed the one that is covered by that huge heatsink) further away, and thus providing more space a second (or even third) PCIe-16 as well as moving the first PCIe-16 further away from that memory slot.
Honestly even if this is somewhat a breakthrough, it's not really a very well designed board in my opinion. Not nearly close to what Supermicro has done with X7DCA-L, grated that's still use the older Core based Xeons but you get the idea.