Gigabyte GA-G1975X

Craig Simms mutters something about drinking too much polyjuice.

The first retail 975x board to hit the Atomic labs, the GA-G1975X (which we’ll call Harry, for short) immediately grabs your attention thanks to the large, transparent blue, wind-tunnel style ‘Turbojet’ system mounted around the CPU socket.
We know what you’re thinking already, and yes, those with a tower cooler or wide HSF may have difficulty in gaining the required clearance on Harry (our Scythe Ninja wouldn’t fit with a fan attached) – however if this is the case, the tubes can be removed from the board with the judicious application of a pair of pliers.
Two small fans at one end of the Turbojet system suck hot air from the case into the tunnels, and two more small fans at the other end vent that hot air to the outside. The northbridge and one set of heatsunk mosfets are contained within the tunnels, allowing them to be cooled by the moving air – an innovative solution. Each of the tunnels have an opening in the middle, so heat radiated from the CPU HSF can also be exhausted.
In practice we found that the fan next to the northbridge was overpowered by the heat emitted from both the northbridge and the reference Intel heatsink, the result being heat blown back into the case, specifically on to the first RAM stick. Replacing the heatsink with a Gigabyte G-Power reduced the amount of heat exhausted back into the case considerably – although not totally – so choose your heatsinks wisely.

As is the norm with Gigabyte packages, Harry comes well equipped accessory wise, with five SATA, two PATA, and one FDD cable, as well as three molex to SATA power adapters. It also comes with an SLI bridge and bridge stabiliser, should the day ever come when Nvidia allow Intel to enable SLI on their board. For now, Crossfire will have to do.

In terms of backplates the board comes packed with six additional USB ports, Firewire A & B (400Mb/s), a customised backplate to accommodate the cooling system, an external SATA bracket and SBLive extended audio output. Yes, Gigabyte has taken us a step above the normal AC97 by including Creative’s onboard chip for a better audio experience, in full 7.1 glory.

External I/O includes two more USB ports, PS/2 ports and oddly only one Ethernet jack. Missing are the parallel and serial connectors, in a continuation of the effort pioneered by Abit in 2002 to banish unneeded legacy ports, Patronus on Dementor style. One can only hope this will meet mainstream application soon, however as evidenced by the floppy drive curse this may take a while longer yet. Still, Gigabyte is to be applauded for picking up the gauntlet once more and beating the rest of the industry around the head with it. Just like Hagrid.

In terms of board layout, there are four RAIDable SATA ports and the usual array of pin headers dotted about the board. The PCI-E retention clip has been revised, allowing you to release your video card from both sides – big props to Gigabyte for this evolution. In fact by and large the board is laid out excellently, with no outstanding physical clashes. Gigabyte have even stomped onto DFI’s territory, providing push buttons on the board for power on/off, and CMOS wipe/power on for when those overclocking experiments go wrong.

For benchmarking we weighed the GA-G1975X against the Asus P5N32-SLI Deluxe, with a P4 660 clocked at 3.6GHz and Geil PC2-5300 RAM in order to compare a 975x board against an nForce4 x16SLI, and as you can see from the graphs the older Nforce chipset generally outperforms the 975X. However if you need a board to run your brand spanking new 955EE with Crossfire, there’s only one thing left to say – ‘You’re a wizard, Harry!’.