Gigabyte EP45-DQ6 Motherboard Review :: Gigabyte EP45-DQ6 Layout

One thing about the CPU area of the board is it is surrounded on three sides by Gigabyte’s SilentPipe cooling solution but there is more than enough clearance for large after-market cooling solution.. The low-profile solid capacitors and circuitry surround the CPU socket on three sides with the holes for the CPU heatsink in the normal position. The SilentPipe II starts at the Southbridge with a pipe leading out to the Northbridge then two more pipes leading out to the two heatsinks on the bottom of the board.

Gigabyte has outfitted this board with two PCI Express x16 slots and two PCI Express x4 slots. As noted before if two PCI Express video cards are installed in CrossfireX mode, the two PCI Express x16 slots operate in x8 mode each. There are also two PCI slots and a single PCI Express x1 slot on the motherboard bringing the expansion slots on the board to seven total ports.

The more SATA ports the better I always say when talking about HDD expansion for a new motherboard. The Gigabyte EP45-DQ6 has no less than ten SATA ports, which is excellent for those that have a lot of SATA devices on their motherboard. Four of the SATA ports are sideways aligned allowing for easy cable management on the board. The board also has an IDE port available for those that have legacy IDE DVD drives or other equipment.

The ICH10R Southbridge controls six of the SATA ports with a Gigabyte SATA2 controller onboard to support the other four SATA ports. The Gigabyte SATA2 chip controls the IDE connector and has two Sil5723 chips to support the Smart Backup feature of this motherboard. Smart Backup sets up a RAID1 mirror with the primary hard drive partition when another HDD is plugged into one of the four GS ports. Smart Backup works independently of the primary RAID partition.

Gigabyte decided to use a 2-phase power configuration for the memory and Northbridge. The rear of the PCB is fairly standard except for bare MOSFET heatsinks surrounding the rear of where the CPU area is on the front. Gigabyte generously includes five USB and Firewire connections bringing the total supported by the board to twelve USB 2.0 ports and 3 Firewire ports. The board supports up to 16GB of DDR2-1333MHz with faster speeds depending upon the memory speeds.

Onboard sound is provided by a Realtek ALC889 CODEC, the latest in a long line of audio CODECs from Realtek. The onboard sound on motherboards is good enough for the vast majority of users as Creative Labs has been very quiet lately due to their legal and financial troubles. The ALC889 supports 7.1 surround sound and 2-channel audio simultaneously.

Gigabyte has a new feature that is rather unique among their boards. The Gigabyte EP45-DQ6 has four LAN ports. Each port is controlled by a Realtek 8111C PHY chip and supports 10/100/1000Megabit LAN. The EP45-DQ6 has support for Teaming on the four LAN ports so they work almost as if they were a single 4 Gigabit LAN port. The rear I/O consists of a PS/2 Mouse port, a PS/2 Keyboard port, 8 USB 2.0 ports, a S/PDIF Out port, a Coaxial port and six jacks for the onboard audio.