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As you can see from the shot below, the Gigabyte X38-DQ6 Quad has Gigabyte's "Crazy Cool" heatsink on the back - as a matter of fact, it even has a smaller one for the south bridge.  The "Crazy Cool", for those that don't know, is the large metal plate you see on the back of the motherboard that Gigabyte's marketing materials claim will improve heat dissipation.

Does Crazy Cool help with chipset cooling?

Probably to some degree; however it is a pain in the posterior for mounting high end processor heatsinks, many of which have their own custom brackets to place on the back of the motherboard.

In order to mount our Noctua-12 cooler, we had to use four motherboard standoffs so that the "X" shaped Noctua back plate would fit over the Crazy Cool heatsink.  It's kind of a trick that many home users aren't going to be happy to have to employ.

Let's start our tour of the motherboard.

The DIMM slots are between the power and IDE connectors and the north bridge and processor socket; and unfortunately they are just a bit too close to let us use the yellow pair of sockets with our Noctua mounted. Note the extra four pin power connector beside the main ATX connector.

Fortunately the heat pipes and heatsinks are cleared by the Noctua, otherwise we might have had to use an inferior heatsink for the review. Look at all those solid state capacitors!

Here we see the eight SATA2 connectors, and the 90' angle-mounted IDE connector.

Look at those two PCIe 2.0 x16 slots... just waiting for CrossFire cards - and if Intel and NVIDIA make nice, perhaps SLI later?

With PCIe 2.0 doubling the data throughput, those three 1x slots are more useful then ever. Now if only peripherals such as video grabbers became available in PCIe 2.0 1x versions...

The two legacy PCI slots are very useful, however a double slot cooler would block one of them if two video cards were installed.

Last, but not least, we have the I/O panel.

I really like seeing eight USB connectors here, along with FireWire and mini-FireWire. Note the plethora of audio connectors - a classic six connector style set of connections on the right, and an SP/DIFF and Optical connection on the right.

The PS2 keyboard and mouse ports are welcome too.