Gigabyte, with it's successful DQ6 series of elegant board goes one up with it's latest incarnation, the Extreme series. This new series, initially EP45 and EP45T are elegantly laid out. From the looks of it, you can see that Gigabyte EP45 Extreme aims at the ASUS Striker boards and the MSI Neo series. On first sight, this mainboard uses a all Copper Heat pipe/Heat sink connecting NB, SB, and MOSFET and extra Hybrid Silent-Pipe design provides 30% cooler thermal performance

Based on the Intel P45 + ICH 10R chipset, this mainboard supports 45nm Intel® Core™ 2 multi-core processors with FSB 1600 MHz running up to Dual channel DDR2 1200. It also supports 2 PCI-E 2.0 x16 graphic interface plus PCI-E x4 with CrossFireX ™ support for ultimate graphics performance. Not only that, the board comes with 2 Gigabit Ethernet LAN with Teaming functionality. The Dual LAN with Teaming functionality enabled allows 2 single connections to act as 1 single connection for 2x Bandwidth and prevents network downtime by transferring the workload from a failed port to a working port. It also helps using (RSS) Receive Side Scaling which balances the network traffic load evenly between 2 CPU cores in order to improve performance. For a greener environment, this board adjusts power consumption automatically according to your LAN cable lengths, up to 10% power savings.

The board also supports Dolby Home Theater® audio to create a stunning surround sound listening experience. Blu-ray playback outputs supported by high quality 106dB SNR ALC889A HD audio

As it targets the overclockers, the BIOS has one of the largest CPU CLK range of up to 1200MHz, it also has multiple over voltage controls. You can also use EasyTune 6 to fine tune the overclocking all within Windows. For those who are into watercooling, this board has it all ready. The North bridge already has the connectors ready. The board comes with a Hybrid Silent-Pipewhich is a all-copper thermal solution design which combines Air cooling with Liquid Cooling to enable effective heat removal from the North Bridge, South Bridge and CPU area.

In addition, there are Power/reset/Clr CMOS onboard button for easily operation on the workbench. DualBIOS helps to minimize wrong bios flashes that results in dead boards. On the board itself are the Debug LED and OV-Alert LED, OC-Alert LED, TMP-Alert LED allows user to easily catch on to PC status.

The board also supports the revolution energy saving design with DES Advanced featuring hardware based Dynamic 6-Gear switching.  Advanced power phase design with virtual 12 power phases to provides highly efficient operation for 45nm CPU. IT also has a 2 power phases for NB chipset and 2 phases for memory power to excel at power efficiency.
 

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