CPU Cooler Fit and Included Accessories
CPU Cooler Fit
To test the amount of space surrounding the CPU socket, we mounted the Noctua NH-D14 cooler to the CPU socket. This behemoth CPU air cooler sports a dual fan construction and two huge vertical cooling towers.
When running the unit oriented to blow air towards the rear panel, there is sufficient room on all side of the socket to accommodate the cooler as well as a PCIe video card seated in the primary PCI-Express x16 slot.
From the side views, you can see that GIGABYTE designed the CPU socket area to accommodate even the larger CPU coolers. There is no clearance issues between the cooler's heat pipes and the CPU VRM cooler. Additionally, all four memory slots remain usable.
The Noctua hold down mechanism is large enough to quickly determine exactly how much space is available around the CPU socket. The mount fits without issue in its allocated space.
Because of the lack of components or power circuitry directly behind the socket area, the backplate poses no risk to the board. The backplate itself rests securely on top of the CPU socket backplate.
Included Accessories
GIGABYTE includes in everything you need to get the board up and running with accessories for supporting the board's more esoteric features.
GIGABYTE includes a comprehensive manual with the board, an install disc containing all necessary drivers and utilities, as well as an Ultra Durable-branded case badge. The motherboard manual contained information on all aspects of the motherboard, including details on the integrated components and BIOS.
The rear panel shield features a flat black base with port identifying text and icons in white, making them easily identified and read.
GIGABYTE included a total of four 6Gb/s rated SATA cables for use with the integrated ports. The cables have integrated port locks with a mix of straight and 90 degree connectors.
For multi-GPU use, GIGABYTE includes both two-way NVIDIA SLI and AMD CrossFire cables.
The included voltage measurment cables plug into the voltage measurement headers below the DIMM slots for measuring board voltages directly from the traces. Instead of having to place multi-meter leads directly on to board measurement points, you attach the leads to the provided extension cables.
GIGABYTE includes their OC Brace for extra support when using multiple video cards on a test bench or open-air type system. The brace screws directly into the board surface offering additional support to the cards for better seating and PCI-Express slot contact. The cards screw directly into the brace similar in nature to the slot brackets in a normal PC enclosure. Gigabyte includes screws for attaching the bracket to the motherboard as well as thumbscrews for securing the cards to the bracket.
fix the pricing section
fix the pricing section
Fixed, thanks for pointing
Fixed, thanks for pointing this out…
What i want to see is a truly
What i want to see is a truly striped down board that is meant to do nothing but overclock. I mean why would you need audio on an OC board, just fill it with PCI-e slots and plx splitters, same thing goes for the onboard video. Get rid of everything that is not needed.
I agree on no need for
I agree on no need for integrated audio, but on these consumer sockets gpu is embeded into cpu so they cannot be removed by board manufcaturers. Also there really is no need of plx chips on oc oriented boards.
don’t see why they could not
don’t see why they could not ditch the ports on the back though, put something like more usb or something there. Also plx chips would be nice of you wanted to bench 4 way gpus not by amd.
Morry, I noticed in the
Morry, I noticed in the Conclusions you noted that the CMOS battery placement was a strength. If I am running Crossfire or SLI, the CMOS battery placement in my opinion sucks, especially if I have my video cards water cooled. What exactly is an ideal place for the CMOS battery and why?
Theoretically, you could run
Theoretically, you could run SLI or CrossFire with the board without impacting the battery. Ideally, the best place for the battery is by the DIMM slots in the the lower left corner of the board, both locations which remain accessible most of the time.
If you start talking about dual or tri-card mode, there are quite a few components that become hard to get to especially when using full sized cards…
Vs it’s predecessor’s battery
Vs it’s predecessor’s battery placement, it’s definitely an improvement.
WHY WHY WHY DO THEY CONTINUE
WHY WHY WHY DO THEY CONTINUE TO PUT PCI SLOTS?!
There are not enough PCI-E
There are not enough PCI-E slots from the chipset to allocate a 1x slot to each board position. Therefore the motherboard makers have a choice of using a PCI-E 1x to 2x PCI bridge which allows for using all seven slots in the ATX spec or leaving one of the slots blank on the board. I can see why they don’t want to leave blank slots, but the slot next to the primary GPU is almost always useless anyways. Some boards also leave the first slot blank and put the primary GPU in the second slot which makes more room for the CPU cooler. and GPU backplate.
Why, oh why, did Gigabyte
Why, oh why, did Gigabyte replace the perfectly good Intel NIC with this killer rubbish? When you ran the network tests, did you have the killer bloatware installed, or just the driver? Also, how exactly was the CPU utilization measured? Does your percentage include the CPU overhead from the simultaneous disk I/O too?
For the network testing, the
For the network testing, the Killer software was installed in addition to the driver. For measuring CPU utilization, Windows Performance Monitor was used with the average measured from that taken as the reported average…