GIGABYTE GA-EP45-DQ6

The board with every feature – even a kitchen sink!

When you first lay eyes on a DQ6 board, you become almost rapt with the multitude of components arranged in a zen-garden-like fashion that blanket every piece of every flat surface. As the premium offering from GIGABYTE, we can only expect good things from this board.

Featuring ferrite chokes and solid capacitors arranged around the CPU socket, and circled on three sides with heatpipes and heatsinks, there is just enough room to install most aftermarket coolers with relative ease. The DDR2 slots are relatively clear, though to install or remove them you will need to remove the graphics card, as there isn’t enough room to open them fully.

The eight-pin and 24-pin power sockets are placed in the best spot for ease of use, and an FDD connector lies alongside the latter. Included with this board is a whopping ten SATA ports! Four of these are right-angled to allow use when long graphics cards are installed. The extra ports are fed by two add-on chips, cooled by a small heatsink.

USB and firewire headers populate the bottom edge of the board, with incredibly convenient power, reset and clear CMOS buttons also present. These are a godsend for any enthusiast or bencher, and make overclocking so much easier.

There are plenty of expansion ports just above here, with the possibility of using PCIe x4 cards. In the tradition of extreme overkill, there are two Realtek chips here, that both give four ports of Ethernet at one gigabit, as well as eight USB ports plus sound.

Benching is made easy with this board, with many overclocking options and full access to all memory options. USB keyboards are disabled in default settings, however, and this makes actually using these settings very annoying, as your keyboard inexplicably seems to have decided to not work. Also notable during testing was the fact that the Northbridge and surrounding cooling got hot to the touch, so airflow is definitely needed here.

All in all, this is a premium product that offers extra functionality, but with similar performance, at an added cost. For the ultimate system, you really can’t go wrong with this board.