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The Board

Inside the fancy packaging we find the Gigabyte EP-45-DQ6 - a nice looking board with a clean layout.

Notice the abundance of metal connectors on the back I/O panel - we will talk more about those shortly.

Gigabyte did a good job on the copper heatsinks and heat pipes - while this board does not have monstrously large heatsinks, it has enough cooling given the geometry shrink of the chipset.

Note the cooling for the VRM modules above the processor socket.

Here is a closer look at the cooling for the Northbridge and VRM's - note the solid state capacitors and coils - obviously a lot of  effort went into the voltage regulation and power distribution for the board.

Here we have the usual color coded dual channel memory slots, under which we have the 24 pin ATX power connector and floppy connector.

To the left of the DIMMs, we have a grand total of TEN SATAII ports - I trust you will agree that is sufficient?

Up a little we have the IDE connector, the front panel connector, and heatsinks presumably over extra SATAII and IDE controller chips.

Nice... connectors for three more FireWire ports, and four more USB ports!

Now we get to three switches - power, reset and clear CMOS. We've seen such switches before on other high end boards, and we always like seeing them as they make life easier during initial board setup and overclocking on a test bench. I like the inclusion of a socket for a serial port - while they are mostly obsolete for home PC's, they can be very handy for tech's.

Look at all those slots!

Going left to right we have:

• two PCI slots
• a PCIe 2.0 8x slot (with 16x connector)
• two PCIe 2.0 4x slots
• a PCIe 2.0 16x slot
• a PCIe 2.0 1x slot

Plenty of room for expansion! Especially if you notice that the PCIe 4x slots are open ended, and note how the heatsink is tapered to allow GPU's to be fit into the 4x slots... looks like you could load the board up with four single slot PCIe GPU's! Hmm... I wonder how four 4850's would perform Crossfired?

The back I/O panel is very impressive. We have:

• PS/2 mouse and keyboard connectors
• Optical and SP/DIFF audio outputs
• FOUR Gigabit Ethernet connectors
• EIGHT USB 2.0 connectors
• six analog audio connectors

Between all the SATAII and Gigabit Ethernet ports one might almost think Gigabyte is targeting the server motherboard market!

And last, but not least, we have the package of cables and connectors. We get:

• Motherboard manual
• Driver CD
• quick install guide
• case sticker
• IO panel for the case
• IDE cable
• floppy cable
• lots of SATAII cables
• USB, FireWire and eSATA brackets

Not included:

• Partridge
• Pear Tree