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The packaging for this Gigabyte box is really tastefully done, but as soon as you pull the board out of the box, two things strike you. Firstly, that the board is particularly heavy, and secondly that it looks like a two year old decided how the board should be coloured.

We have a blue PCB, red and yellow DIMM slots, green IDE, orange CPU bracket, white CPU socket and ATX connectors, blue PCI Express slots (a different blue from the PCB), pastel/orange PCI-E slot (different from the CPU bracket), yellow/orange SATA connectors, black PCI Express slots, purple SATA connectors. My list is far from exhausted, every colour imaginable is splattered all over the board. It doesn't necessarily look bad, so much as chaotic.

Gigabyte has taken a similar approach to Asus when it comes to cooling. A heatsink on the south bridge passes heat to the north bridge via a heat pipe. Then two heat pipes connect the north bridge to the large heatsink cooling that VRMs. This is in turn cooled by the excess air from the CPU cooler. In this case however, the heatsink is actually made of copper and not anodised aluminium. There is even a heat spreading plate on the back of the motherboard.

The 24-pin ATX connector is on the very right hand edge of the motherboard, while the 8-pin EPS connector is on the very top right of the board. On all the other boards, this connector (or the 4-pin) was floating around somewhere in the middle of the board, so this is a good thing.

Gigabyte has decided to space out the SATA connectors on this board considerably. Two are next to the single IDE channel, while the other four available on the 590 SLI Chipset are a few inches below. Along the bottom of the motherboard you can find another two SATA ports, on a seperate controller. As it has gone to the effort of putting on a separate controller, I'm surprised it didn't decide to add another IDE port for legacy users. There is method in Gigabyte's madeness though, as it has included a bracket that converts any two SATA connectors in to eSATA. The bracket is very well done and even includes a Molex connection for powering devices.

At the very top of the slots, Gigabyte has managed to squeeze in an x1 PCI Express slot that is right next to the north bridge. This means you can only fit a card is only as long as the slot itself.

Below that we have two x16 PCI Express graphics slots, with a two slot spacing inbetween them. In these slots we have another x1 PCI Express slot and an x4 PCI Express slot. At the very bottom, we have two PCI slots for any devices that aren't available on PCI Express just yet (i.e anything that isn't a graphics card).

On the back panel, we have PS/2 ports, parallel, serial, 4-pin FireWire, four USB 2.0 and twin Gigabit Ethernet. Audio is provided by the Realtek ALC888 chipset, with optical S/PDIF and six analogue connectors.

Gigabyte has employed the use of its Dual Bios technology. With this, if a flash goes wrong, you always have a backup to boot from. Inside the BIOS, things aren't quite as straight forward.

First of all, we have the annoying fact that we have to press CTRL+F1 in order to get all options available to us. But I had a number of other issues too.

Multiplier adjustment didn't work, so I couldn't lower it in order to overclock the motherboard as far as possible. There was also no option to turn Cool N Quiet on or off, perhaps related?

The Voltage adjustment on the CPU is just adjusting the VID pins and only gives options up to 1.55V. On the FX62 I used, this meant the voltage didn't adjust at all above its default.

There is full adjustment for memory timings, HT frequencies and several different voltage adjustments. However, as there is no CPU voltage adjustment that actually works, this is pretty useless.

In the Health section of the BIOS, it didn't actually tell me what the voltages were reported at – but rather just if they were “OK”. I assume this means they are within tolerance levels, but quite frankly I'd sooner be the judge!

I also had stability issues with this board running at standard speeds. I had to increase chipset voltages in order to get a stable benchmark.

Verdict

This is a pretty well specced out board with a good layout. However, the BIOS needs work and overclocking is pretty much a no-no.

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