Related Articles

The Gigabyte 6-QUAD GA-P35T-DQ6 motherboard does stand out in a crowd with its rather extravagant (and somewhat obstructive) heatpipe cooling system. Aside from all that plumbing and cooling, there is little else to touch upon, but for us hardware junkies, it's the tiniest details that count the most. So as usual, I'll slowly drift over the Gigabyte 6-Quad motherboard and touch upon those aspects I found to be interesting, and any I found irritating.

The front of the board, and a nice landscape view of that Crazy Cool heatpipe system.

The back is just a bunch of traces, say except for that lagre heat spreader plate right beneath the CPU socket and P35 Express Northbridge. There's that little heat spreader under the Southbridge too.

The DDR3 memory slots are color coded in hot pink and flouresent green. An odd color scheme, but something that makes dual channel memory installation a breeze.

Having the 24 pin power connector up front here is a good placement, as is that of the floppy port. That 4 pin Molex power connector on the far right is a bit of a mystery though. It doesn't provide additional power to the DDR3 memory modules, they use lower voltages than DDR2. It is most likely there to provide supplemental power to the 24 pin power array. Staring at the traces on the back of the board would suggest so.  

Speaking of power, there's the 8 pin CPU auxilary power connector. Though it is located next to the CPU socket, it is in somewhat of a difficult position, wedged between the copper heat pipes and the rear I/O ports. It would however make for a very clean case instalation, not having that cord running across the motherboard to find its place.

A flouresent green IDE port; perhaps for those of us with UV lights and glowing cables?

Four yellowish USB2.0 pin headers, six punkin orange SATA ports, two royal purple SATA ports, and an aerial view of our green IDE port.

Gigabyte makes SATA2 chips? The little little logo in the bottom right has me thinking that it's made by JM Micro.  

A closer look at out USB pin headers.

Pin headers for IEEE1394 Firewire ports.

The front panel pin headers for the likes of power and reset and such.

Gigabyte took an odd position on the placement of the front panel audio pin headers, or perhaps I should say that they wanted to stand above everybody else. This pin tower may look quite flimsy, but it is in fact incrediblly sturdy, deflecting only ever so slightly when pushed or pulled. It's odd yes, but seems to be the only reasonable location Gigabyte could mange to put it. My greatest reservation with this approach; difficulty when plugging in all of those little terminal blocks. Perhaps Gigabyte could start making a master terminal block for their front panel audio headers, maybe even for the front panel buttons too. Asus did that with their Striker Extreme motherboard.

The little audio cable ports are nothing new, but the TPM pin header is. TPM (Trusted Platfrom Module) is a type of new hardware device that provides certified hardware verification. It typicall uses a small microcontroller chip that will communicate with the installed hardware and or software. It allows for a method of hardware device verification in order to ensure proper computer function. But, it is also uses a means of authenticating programs and user identification to provide enhanced security for the system upon which it is installed. To be ever so blunt about it, TPM is a fancy term for hardware/software police. It does have it's benefits, but it's nothing more than a sophisticated form of Copy Protection and Digital Rights Management for hardware, software and passwords.

The Realtek 8 channel ALC889A Audio controller chip and some capacitors living around it.

The expansion slots are color coded too.

All of the rear I/O's are nicely laid out, though having the Parallel Printer Port up high like that is just a little akward. I do like though the inclusion of a serial port for those of us with older legacy devices.

One thing Gigabye is boasting with the 6-QUAD is their Ultra Durable 2 constrution. The Low RDS MOSFETS (Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor) are solid state components that help regulate and augment the current flow throughout the mother board and connected parts. The Ferrite Cores are a type of Electromagnetic choke, helping to reduce the occurance of EM fields from forming during operation. And everybody is using Solid State Capacitors now, mainly for thier longer life span.

These parts are of good quality, and they shoud help extend the life of the 6-QUAD for some years to come.

The silk screening is pretty nice too.

This is odd; a clear CMOS jumper. Simply by shorting these two jumper pins, it clears the CMOS. Usually, moving jumper blocks to different positions does this. More often than not, motherboard manufacturers will solder a clear CMOS button to the top of their motherboards. One could always salvage the reset button from a dead case and plug it in.

And finally, there's the Copper Silent Pipe and Crazy Cooling system, and boy is it crazy! But in order to truely convey the insanity of it all, I had to mount one of our Noctua NH-U 12 CPU coolers to the Gigabyte 6-QUAD GA-P35DQ6 motherboard. I found a number of significant obstacles during this crazy experience.

First of all, there's these two plates on the bottom side of the motherboard. The smaller one (on the left) lives under the Southbridge chipset. The other (right of course) resides beneath the Northbridge chipset and CPU socket. Gigabyte says that they can be removed. We'll see. As for their cooling capabilities, they do cool a bit, but since the P35 chipset isn't the blistering inferno that the NVIDIA 680i chipset is, I'd say that all this cooling is somewhat unecessary. The larger of the two does have some threaded portions to help retain the cooling infastructure up top, and Gigabyte says in their manual that they include extra nuts to use in place of this large back plate. These extra fasteners wern't included in our bundle. Grumble, grumble.

Up top there is this one hidden screw beneath the Northbridge heatsink. There's also three of the smaller machine screws (to the left) that have to some out to remove the backing plate. But again, since Gigabyte never included the replacement nuts, we're not going to be removing the cooler.

On that note, it may apppear impossible to remove that hidden screw, but the top Silet-Pipe plate acutally comes off. Once removed, the end user can use a screwdriver to remove said hidden screw.

A nice little Southbridge heatsink.

The heatsinks for the Voltage Controler Modules (VCM). The VCM is a series of MOSFESTs' that help to adjust and regulate the current being fed to the processor. Very important.

Looks like we have a lot of space around the CPU socket for some heavy duty cooling action. Or do we?

I had to physically bend the bottom cooling fins for one of our Noctua NH-U 12 CPU coolers to make it fit over the Northbridge heatsink. When I orientated the cooler the other way, I had to ben the fins even further to make them fit over the VCM heatsink between the CPU socket and rear I/O panel. Not a particularly pleasing thing to do.

Conversly, when I tried our ThermalRight Ultra 120 CPU cooler on for size, it had more than enough room to breath. But, since we preform all of our motherboard revies and the subsequent overclocking with a Noctua NH-U 12 cooler attached, we're going to stick with our Noctua for consistency's sake. Unfortunatlly, that presented further complications.

Because Gigabyte had never included the extra fasteners to allow for the removal of the rear backing plate, I once again had to improvise. I've used this trick before, specificlly with my review of the P6N SLI Platinum motherboard. In that case, there was a small surface mounted capacitor right in the way of the back mounting plate for the Noctua. Had I not used this method to extend the mounting plate, it would have been quite possible to crush or snap off that oh so poorly placed capaitor. In the case of our Gigabyte 6-QUAD, it's just that big shiny backing plate that's in the way, and those extra nuts that are missing.

Furthermore, I also experienced a cooler related problem when reviewing the ASUS Striker Extreme Edition motherboard. It had to do with the retention screw for the Noctua extending too far beyond its mounting bracket and impacting one one of the Ferrite cores that accompany the VCM around the processor socket. The end of the screw had actually chiped off a portion of the core casing. It didn't kill the board of course, but it was sad to see that digital soldier wounded in action.

So I had to improvise further, just like a resourceful hardware reviewer should. By tossing a washer inbetween the Noctua mounts, essentially extending its height ever so slightly, I was able to prevent the mounting screw from impacting the Ferite cores below and causing any subsequent damage. It's something I shouldn't have had to do, but the cooling system on the Gigabyte 6-QUAD GA-P35T-DQ6 is crazy, in both ways. Not only does it cool quite well, but it gets in your way while doing it.

Aside from the problem mounting the Noctua and perhaps with the odd little pin tower for the front panel audio, I'd say that the Gigabyte 6-QUAD GA-P35T-DQ6 motherboard is built quite well. Physically, it has all the bells and whistles one would come to expect from a top end enthuasist level piece of hardware, and certainly everything I would come to expect from the likes of Gigabyte.

The bundled hardware is next.