Gigabyte GA-X48-DQ6 Review :: Gigabyte GA-X48-DQ6 Layout

The layout of the board is excellent in most respects, with Gigabyte using a passive heat sink solution to surround the CPU area. The Northbridge is cooled by a heat sink with a pipe leading out to the Southbridge chip. Two pipes lead out from the Northbridge to the rear heat sink. In practice the cooling solution kept the NB and SB at low temperatures. The GA-X48-DQ6 supports the latest Yorkfield 45 nanometer CPUs with 1600MHz FSB, meaning that if you have a new Intel CPU it should work with this board.

ZIF

NB

SB

Cooling Pipe

The GA-X48-DQ6 uses DDR2 memory with four DIMM slots supporting up to 8GB of DDR2-1200MHz memory. Intel’s X48 chipset supports DDR2 or DDR3 and many board manufacturers are releasing X48 boards with DDR2 like Asus, Gigabyte and the other Tier-1 makers. DDR2 memory is rated at up to 1066MHz, providing up to 8.5GB/second of memory bandwidth. DDR2 memory is less expensive and more readily available than DDR3 memory, making this an interesting choice as Gigabyte went with DDR3 memory on the GA-X38-DQ6 that preceded this board.

Back Heatsink

Memory

Power Meter

PCI Express 2.0 Slots

There are two PCI Express generation 2.0 x16 slots on the board providing support for ATI’s Crossfire solution. PCI Express 2.0 gives up to 5 Gigabits of bandwidth per lane, allowing up to 8 Gigabytes of bandwidth for each x16 slot. Note that while x32 slots can be used on the X48 chipset, the two PCI Express 2.0 slots on this board are x16 only which is more than enough for today’s video cards as it hardly stresses generation 1 PCI Express x16 slots. Expansion includes three PCI Express x1 slots and two PCI 2.2 slots. If two-slot video cards are used like the 3870X2, the second PCI Express x1 slot and a PCI slot may be covered.

PCI Express 1x

PCI

FDD

IDE

Six SATA 3 Gb/second ports are on the board next to the left hand side of the board and two are located near the Southbridge heat sink meaning that there are 8 total SATA ports on the board. The SATA ports are color coded with two purple ports controlled by a Gigabyte SATA2 controller chip. The X48 chipset does not natively support IDE connectors; this task is left to the Gigabyte SATA2 controller as well.

2 SATA

Gigabyte SATA

24-pin Power

8-pin Power

The 24-pin power connector is located on the rear right hand side of the board next to an auxiliary Molex connector and the FDD port. The 8-pin power connector is on the top of the board under the rear I/O and next to the heat pipe heat sink. There are capacitors all along the top and right hand sides of the CPU Socket. There is plenty of clearance for aftermarket CPU coolers around the CPU socket.

Audio

Rear I/O

Gigabyte decided to include the Realtek ALC889A with DTS Connect for the onboard audio solution. The 889A is Realtek’s latest CODEC with support for 10 DACs, 6 ADCs, and is fully High Definition Audio compliant. The ALC889A has the widest DAC/ADC Sample Rate of the Realtek CODEC’s available. The key features of HDA compliant CODECs include multiple audio streams (7.1+2 channel), EAX compliant sound (for games that have support for the EAX extensions) and support for Dolby DTS sound.

The rear I/O on the board is very complete for any user. PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports are present for the legacy user, but there are also 8 USB 2.0 ports for the now standard USB mouse and keyboards on the market. 2 RJ-45 jacks on the board provide Gigabit Ethernet controlled by a Gigabit 8111C chip. Six audio jacks a coaxial S/PDIF Out and an optical coaxial S/PDIF Out connector provide support for the onboard audio. Rounding out the rear I/O is two IEEE-1394a ports for Firewire devices.