GIGABYTE GA-EP45T-EXTREME

We take a look at the board that has single-handedly caused a world Copper shortage.

Wow. Upon opening the box for this mobo, the stock chipset cooling is impressive, with an array of heatpipes and capacity for watercooling directly on the Northbridge. But, asked the good folks at GIGABYTE, is it [i]Extreme[/i] enough? Apparently not, because a further heatsink add-on is bundled with the mobo, and screws directly onto the Northbridge (with application of thermal goop to fill the gaps) to supplement the cooling.

The drawback to this (apart from the immense size) is that you lose an expansion slot. You won’t mind though, because the damn thing looks so cool (pun probably not intended). This is definitely not a board for the LAN-goer either, since the whole contraption weighs well over a kilogram, and is in fact so heavy that two support braces are installed on the rear of the motherboard just to stop the thing from snapping in two!

The RAM slots are DDR3, and coloured green and a very odd pink. There are six SATA ports present, two of which are right-angled. Those two ports are the only ones you’ll be able to use with any decent graphics card too – a massive oversight.

There is an LED POST screen present, which is kinda nifty, but it doesn’t display realtime temperature monitoring like the Biostar board. Buttons for those lazy benchers are also present, with a lot of headers along the bottom of the board, but frustratingly the audio is wedged into a tiny space and will require some careful manoeuvres to plug it in.

Crossfire is a welcome feature on this board with the possibility of dual 4870s or triple 4850s, though they will be quite starved of bandwidth.
Coloured the familiar ‘GIGABYTE Blue’ (an obviously technical description), the mobo has solid caps, and a tumultuously placed array of surface-mounted LEDs on every spare space on the board, that all light up depending on load and other functions.

The BIOS is as easy to navigate and use as most GIGABYTE boards, and the excessive cooling should allow cool Northbridge temps when overclocking – just make sure you’ve got some airflow in the case to use it.

With an array of interesting features, offset by some bad choices, we can’t really recommend this board to anyone but the most hardcore of users.