The Baby Maker

Opening up the package, we find a huge amount of copper heat dissipation on the board showing that GIGABYTE is serious about this being their top of the line overclocking board.

Alongside the Northbridge waterblock is a section allowing you to screw down a heat-pipe add-on that sits in the first PCI bracket. This gives you the heat dissipation support if you are not using water-cooling, or if you want some extra heat dissipation to help your water-cooling setup.

There are some conveniently labelled headers and buttons on board to power up and reset if you are running it on a test bench. Also, there is a diagnostics display so you can find out why your system won't boot if there is a problem.

The best part about this board, however, is the Dual BIOS setup, which will fix any corruptions in the main BIOS or help rollback to the original settings, should you accidentally go too far and can't get back into the BIOS to fix it.

Looking at the backplane, we can see this board has a nice set of ports whilst still clinging to the PS/2 mouse and keyboard for the diehard legacy people. There is a full complement of USB 2.0 and Gigabit Ethernet ports.

There's analogue and digital sound outputs for full surround sound as well as a nifty clear-CMOS button to save you opening the case to do a BIOS reset. It looks like they really have thought of everything here.

Flipping the board over, we can see that all this copper is securely bolted to the board itself, so there's no chance it will fall off.