GA-EP45T-EXTREME: a gutsy performer

It’s not often that a board arrives in the APC lab which requires two of the staff members to lift it. You could interpret this gross exaggeration as APC staff being undernourished weaklings, or you could construe it the way it was meant to be: that the copper cooling mounted on the Gigabyte GA-EP45T EXTREME is serious machinery. It’s a complex cooling solution, with a variety of pipes connected to major copper heatsinks around the Intel P45 Northbridge, Intel ICH10R Southbridge, as well as the MOSFETs around the CPU socket.

If you’re like Maverick – that’s right, you are dangerous! – you’ll appreciate the ability to plug the impressive copper cooling solution into your watercooling kit – it’s ready to be jacked in and watered down right out of the box. If you’re like us and a little bit on the Goose side, you’ll opt to use the massive air-cooled radiator instead. It’s about the size of a small video card, and knocks out one of the PCI Express x1 slots. Considering there are plenty of slots to go around, that probably won’t be an issue.

There’s a total of three full length PCI Express 2.0 slots, one running at 16x, one at 8x and one at 4x. If you’ve got a couple of ATI cards gathering dust, get ready to brush them off to make use of this board’s CrossFire support, while there’s a final PCI Express x1 slot just in case you’ve got one of the three PCI Express x1 components on the planet. Three trusty old PCI slots round out the board’s slots.

In case you hadn’t guessed, this board is designed with overclocking in mind, but the fun doesn’t stop with the insane cooling solution. Oh no, there’s plenty more to be had thanks to the dozens of miniature LEDs that adorn the board. When it’s running, the thing looks like a Christmas tree on stimulants. LEDs tell you the voltage of the memory and CPU, just in case you can’t be bothered diving into the BIOS. Good thing they do too, as Gigabyte has delivered more voltage controls thanks to “hardware overvoltage control ICs”.

Yet the BIOS didn’t seem too far apart from other enthusiast boards, with a standard plethora of settings to allow overclockers to wring the most out of their CPU. We stayed away from memory overclocking on this board, as we didn’t have the necessary DDR3 modules to test this, but we did have a field day with the CPU overclocking. We ended up with a tidy 470Mhz frontside bus, nothing to be sneezed at. But even when running at default speeds, thanks to the speedy P45 Northbridge and ICH10R Soutbridge, this is a blazingly fast motherboard.

You’ll just need to spend a few thousand on equally impressive components to get the most of it – including the aforementioned DDR3 memory, which even Bill Gates would think twice about paying for. And if you can afford DDR3 memory, the reasonable asking price of around $350 for this motherboard shouldn’t be an issue.

There are a gazillion and one other features crammed onto the board – you name it, it’s got it. The more notable of these include an Infion Trusted Platform Module chip, allowing you to encrypt chosen files with 2048-bit protection. If saving the planet keeps you awake at night, you’ll appreciate the fact that your overclocked beastie is only using as much energy as a small town rather than a small city, thanks to the Gigabyte Dynamic Energy Saver features. We could spend several pages talking about these, but to be honest we didn’t test all of them – it would have taken the better part of a month to do this board justice.

Even though we didn’t test every single nook and cranny of this board, we’ve seen enough to proclaim this one of the most thorough and capable Intel compatible boards on the market, with two major caveats. Firstly, it uses DDR3 – which is a major disadvantage if you ask us. Secondly, it supports CrossFire and not SLI, which comes down to personal choice. If you’re an overclocker, whether or not you opt for the GA-EP45T-EXTREME will probably come down to your opinion on these two areas.