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Gigabyte EP45 Extreme Preview

Posted by NickS | Published in News Archives | [-no comments-]

Tweaktown was recently given a chance to look at Giga-Byte’s new Intel P45 Express based Core 2 Duo motherboard. This is Giga-Byte’s “ultra high-end” P45 board and is direct competition for Foxconn’s “Black Ops” motherboard, which has gotten the attention of many big name people in the overclocking world.

The EP45 boasts an unusually huge chipset cooler, which is so large it could qualify as a video card or CPU cooler!

The board also features a very robust 12-phase PWM design and 2-phase PWM for the RAM & northbridge. The final release revision will feature power & reset buttons located on the PCB itself, as well as debug LED’s. The board features regular things like six SATA, a single IDE port, 8 USB 2.0 ports at the rear, the usual PS/2 ports, 7.1 audio, dual gigabit ethernet ports, optical & coax SPDI/F out and three firewire headers. The board also has three physical 16x PCI-E slots. The top most slot with one card will be 16x. With two cards, the top slot & middle slot will operate at 8x each. The bottom most slot is 4x only. The board also features Giga-Byte’s exclusive Dual-BIOS technology.

In addition to all of that, Giga-Byte has designed a new version of their classic tool “Easy Tune.” It’s a very clean and intelligently laid out program similar to CPU-Z but with the added functionality of OS adjustments to clocks & voltages. It also doubles as a hardware monitoring application, and can even overclock Giga-Byte made video cards as well. All of these features combined give this board killer potential to be one of the most popular enthusiast P45 boards, as long as Giga-Byte can keep up with the demand.

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