No more pink DRAM slots in this motherboard!
As a GIGABYTE rep proudly proclaimed about this latest board, the DRAM slots are no longer pink. This was a major point of contention for many, as they seemed to think that the colour didn’t match their clothes (either that, or they just didn’t like it). Well, the colour scheme is now a very impressive blue, white, grey and orange, and looks extremely attractive. Looks, as we’ll find in a minute, are not even half the story.Ten right-angled SATA ports are all lined up along the right edge of the board, a literal plethora of ports to give you maximum flexibility when designing your next rig. There is also a little LED POST screen just below these, which shows alphanumerical codes that let you know which part of the boot went haywire. Two fan headers are also along this side of the board, giving you easy expansion.Mobo power is provided by the 24-pin socket, and the 8-pin is at the usual location. Six DDR3 slots (appropriately coloured, of course) are able to be played with, without removing larger graphics cards first. In the top-right hand corner, you’ll see power and a reset button – a really great placement that means you can still use them even when running Tri-SLI. There is a huge bank of surface-mounted LEDs here also, pumping out more photons than James Bond does puns. We’re of the notion that the more light that motherboards can flood the case with, the better.The CPU socket has a voluminous amount of space around it, with plenty of solid capacitors and chokes to ensure quality power. Perhaps the most interesting part of this area is the chipset cooling. A long heatpipe snakes across the board, connecting the power regulation with a heatsink on the X58 northbridge, and continuing to the NT200 and southbridge chips. Not only that, but the northbridge itself has the option of using watercooling, by simply connecting the existing barbs to the loop. And, to outdo their own excessive cooling, they also include a large bolt-on heatsink too, that takes up two expansion slots, but provides a much larger surface area over which to dissipate the heat. One would wonder the effectiveness of this when the X58 chip makes so little heat, but keep in mind that all the power regulation and extra NT200 chip do make a significant amount, and it does help maintain stability – especially under load.The back panel is comprised of eight USB ports, two Ethernet, two PS/2, Firewire, Optical/Coaxial out, 7.1 channel analogue audio, Firewire, and a clear CMOS button. eSATA would have been a nice inclusion back here, but we’re too distracted by that huge heatsink to care.Expansion slots receive a nice treatment as well (though for those colour purists out there the orange probably won’t do it for you), with plenty of options. Space is at a premium if you use the heatsink, so keep that in mind for if you want a dual-card rig with another card. The bottom PCIe slot is the physical 16x, but is only electrically 8x.The audio port is nestled between the backpanel audio sockets, the chipset cooling, and the add-on heatsink – this makes it very hard to plug in or out in a case! This seriously needs moving by now, unless you’ve got extremely thin and elongated fingers.All the cooling on the board allowed us to get to a stable QPI of 165, and the BIOS was very precise and easy to use. This is a great result, and anyone building a Nehalem system would be very happy with the overclocking performance.
Issue: 106 | November, 2009