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Gigabyte GA EP45 DQ6 Motherboard
A Closer Look
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Front |
Features |
Back |
If you walk through the isles of your local computer hardware store, you will not help but notice this board. The box for this motherboard is, in a word, shiny. It jumps out at you with its holofilm background and lots of "ULTRA" words which were mentioned at least 19 times on all surfaces of the box. Putting that fact aside, the box does describe lots of interesting features that the motherboard has so I would not be surprised if anyone buys it because of the plethora of features listed on the box. When I opened the front flap of the board I found the motherboard's massive copper heatsink exposed through the see trough plastic.
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Motherboard in the Box |
Motherboard out of the Box |
Accessories |
Ports |
Talking the motherboard out of the box, I found out that the it came with quite a bit of goodies. Picture 3 from the right side (Above) includes all the accessories that came with the motherboard. From the top we have the IEEE 1394a port bracket, port faceplate, user manual and drivers CD. Just below that we have the IDE and Floppy cables, 4 SATA cables, and 2 eSATA brackets. Talking a closer look at the ports of the motherboard, I am left speechless. While most highend motherboards include 2 gigabit (Gb) LAN ports, Gigabyte decided to throw in 4 which have teaming capability to offer up to 4 Gb/s transfer rates. Aside form the 4 Gb ports, there is an optical audio out offering 106 dB SNR digital quality audio (anything over 100 dB SNR is usually considered high quality) and 6 analog audio outputs for individual speakers.
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CPU Socket Close Up |
RAM Close Up |
Gigabyte's heatsink design leaves plenty of space for installing any kind of CPU cooler. In the picture above, you can notice the 4 screws coming out of the motherboard for the watercooling system that I will be using. As you can see there is still plenty of space remaining even after the installation of the heatsink. A closer look to the area around the CPU socket reveals that Gigabyte is using solid state capacitors which offer longer life and increased stability.
Between the 24 pin power connector and the RAM slots you can notice 12 leds corresponding to the 12 power phases of the CPU, a nice extra on Gigabyte's part.
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PCI Close Up |
SATA Ports |
The PCI slots in this picture are as follows:
Coming from the top we have a PCI-E 16x slot for the graphics card (Blue), followed by 2 PCI 4x (Smaller orange), a PCI-E 8x (Large orange), and 2 PCI slots (White). The reason why Gigabyte decided to make a 16x slot 8x is completely beyond me. With the CrossFire systems becoming more and more popular, it would only make sense to make both large slots PCI 16x.
Just under the PCI slots we have the Power, Clear CMOS and Reset switch which definitely came in handy while overclocking. Just right of that we are presented with 2 USB (yellow), and 3 IEEE 1394 (gray) pin outs. The color coding helped me greatly when I was setting up my PC. The one thing I found rather inconvenient was the location of the IDE port (Green). If you think about it, the IDE port is located right under the graphics cards, therefore after I installed the Radeon 4870 into my computer, I found out that the cable did not reach the location where I wanted to put my IDE DVD Drive.
The picture on the right is a picture of the SATA 2 ports. The GA-EP45-DQ6 has a total of 10 SATA ports. The purple ones are completely independent of the yellow ones and lie on the Gigabyte RAID controller while the yellow ones lie on Intel's South Bridge RAID Controller. Because of this option, you can have the hard drive plugged into the Gigabyte ports mirror the operations on the drives plugged into Intel's ports thus automatically backing up your date without putting extra strain on your system. The board that I received did not have working Gigabyte ports, therefore I will be unable to test that particular feature.
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