Gigabyte EP45-UD3P Motherboard Review :: Gigabyte EP45-UD3P Layout

The CPU area of the board is surrounded on two sides by the Northbridge heatsink cooler and the heatpipe to the rear heatsink. The area is clear of obstacles, with low-profile capacitors. The positioning of the heatsinks should not interfere with the installation of aftermarket cooling solutions. The low-profile heatsinks on the NB and MOSFETS should not interfere with CPU Cooler installation.

Gigabyte uses all 100% Japanese MOSFETs on this board with rated lifetimes of 50000 hours. The MOSFETS are cooled by a heatsink with the Ultra Durable logo and a traditional MOSFET heatsink for the MOSFETS on the right hand side of the board, The Gigabyte board layout is very clean with a nice blue colored PCB that has come to identify their boards.

Expansion on this board consists of two PCI Express x16 Generation 2 slots, three PCI Express x1 slots and two PCI slots for backwards compatibility on this board. You can install two ATI cards in the PCI Express x16 slots. The P45 chipset does not have enough PCI Express lanes to do x16 x16 with the graphics card. When two cards are installed the bandwidth is split into x8 x8 between the two slots. That is the main difference between the X48 and P45 chipsets.

Hard drive expansion on the board consists of eight SATA ports. One big plus of the motherboard is the location of the SATA ports. The SATA ports are located between the first PCI slot and the second PCI Express x16 slot, meaning long video cards will not interfere with the installation of SATA drives. Also on the board is an IDE port and a FDD port, meaning that legacy ports are there if you need it. Two further SATA ports are located under the DIMM slots.

The motherboard has four DIMM Sockets for up to 16GB of DDR2-1366+ MHz memory. The fastest available DDR2 memory on the market today is DDR2 8800 but this board will go faster if it is available. The memory modules are in a good place right below the NB heatsink and above the 24-pin power connector and IDE connector.

The 24-pin power connector is in the normal place on the motherboard on the bottom right corner of the board. This makes cable management easy to do and pretty standard for an Intel board. The 8-pin power connector is on the upper right hand portion of the board under the PS/2 ports. This location means that the cable has a direct path from the PSU to the motherboard.

The onboard audio on the board is provided by the venerable Realtek ALC889a High Definition CODEC that has been in use on motherboards for a couple of years now. This provides up to 7.1 Surround Sound+2 channels front panel simultaneous output. The EP45 UD3P supports S/PDIF In/Out and CD in via the jacks on the rear IO.

The Rear IO is where all of the expansion on the board without adding brackets comes in. The ubiquitous PS/2 mouse and PS/2 keyboard ports are present. Frankly I don’t know who would use a PS/2 device with a new motherboard and the proliferation of USB or Wireless mice and keyboards but it is there if you need it. The board has ample USB expansion with 8 USB 2.0 ports on the IO. Two Gigabit RJ45 jacks allow the boar to support Teaming. In keeping with the multiple of expansion options on the board an IEEE1394a and an IEEE1394b port are present. S/PDIF Coaxial and Out ports and 6 audio jacks round out the IO on the board.