Now with twice the copper of any other motherboard!!111eleven!
As we've already alluded to in the title, this board has something special about it - twice as much copper as normal boards. As part of the Ultra Durable 3 scheme, the copper layers in this board are twice as thick as the standard in most boards. Apart from making it sturdy enough to snowboard with, does this actually improve performance? GIGABYTE certainly think so, and that's what we're going to find out, right after we take a short detour around this board's layout.
Starting with the CPU socket, there's plenty of room on all sides to install large coolers, and there's a voidal amount of room between here and the memory slots. The northbridge and power regulation are cooled by neat aluminium and blue-anodised plating, and a nickel-coated copper heatpipe joining them. Strangely placed, there is a Realtek chip just underneath this heatpipe, which seems to be powering one of the Ethernet ports.
The memory slots are in a decent location, though you'll have to remove your graphics card to install modules. Power sockets, IDE and Floppy, as well as 8 SATA ports are all in the usual places, though sadly none of them are right-angled. Front panel connectors at the lower extremity of the board are colour-coded for easy installation, and there are USB and Firewire headers also present. The audio header is up near the back panel connectors.
While we're near the back panel, you get eight USB ports, two Ethernet, Firewire in both large and mini flavours, twin PS/2 ports, Optical and Coaxial, and finally 7.1 channel audio sockets. There are only three system fan headers present on this board, and none in the lower right-hand corner where they come in handy for intake fans. Encrusting the board on every spare piece of real estate are LEDs, which can get rather annoying.
BIOS options are very good, with plenty of control over voltages and speeds. All these would be for nought, if performance wasn't up to scratch. The good thing - it is, and more!
As you would probably know, motherboards are made up of layers consisting of silicon, and a copper layer that acts as a ground or power transfer medium, as well as transferring heat, spreading it over a larger surface area. The typical copper layer will be about as thick as your average piece of paper (just like the one you're reading this on), and offers about the same stability as one. However, the layers used here are twice the thickness - this gives much increased physical durability. Indeed, the board hardly flexes when bent, and you'd have to be trying rather hard to get it to.
With this increased beneficial physical property also brings with it a desirable electrical one too - twice the conductive material means that twice as many electrons can flow through. We postulated before on whether or not this would actually increase performance, and thanks to Issue 93's P45 roundup, we can check this easily - and it does work!
Comparing the wPrime 32M result of this board to the GIGABYTE EP45-DS3R, we see a decrease in time taken by 4.431 seconds, an increase of 8.38 per cent performance gain at stock settings! This trend continued with the ASUS P5Q Deluxe, with a decrease of 4.805 seconds, a 9.02 per cent performance increase. These increases are quite astounding for a simple doubling of the thickness, and are very impressive.
You'll wind up paying about $50 more for this board over the aforementioned GIGABYTE board, but the performance is definitely here, and the potential for memory and CPU overclocking is greatly increased - something that every enthusiast will love to bits and bytes.
Issue: 106 | November, 2009