Gigabyte 6Quad GA-P35-DQ6 Review :: Gigabyte GA-P35-DQ6 Layout

Gigabyte really went the extra mile in terms of their passive chipset cooling on the board. They introduced their patented Silent Pipe technology a few years ago which used a copper thermal pipe to cool the chipset and power MOSFET down. The GA-P35-DQ6 has a new edition of the SilentPipe technology. As we’ll see in the Setup page of the review, the board shows an excellent thermal temperature even while under load. The SilentPipe surrounds the CPU Socket on three sides, with solid state transistors on the top and right side of the socket. No issues with installing the CPU with either a normal stock cooler or a after-market cooler. One issue with the cooling on the board is there is a heatsink on the back of the board, meaning that the use of an after-market cooling solution that requires a special back plate to be mounted may not be possible on this board.

SilentPipe

SilentPipe logo

24-pin power

8-pin power

Gigabyte logo

Front Panel I/O

The 24-pin power connector is on the bottom right corner of the board meaning that there is an easy time routing the power cable to the connector. The 8-pin power connector is on the top of the board on top of the SilentPipe cooling system. A 4-pin Molex connector is on the board next to the 24-pin power connector. The headers are located on the left side of the board next to the blue SATA ports. One small issue I have with most motherboard manufacturers is the placement of the memory DIMM slots near to the first PCI Express slot, meaning that removing memory may require removing the video card first. Gigabyte’s board has the same issue with a long video card such as the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra blocking all four DIMM slots when inserted.