The Box, The Accessories, The Board
Diving into the packaging I have to say Gigabyte took advantage of every inch possible on this box. There are about 50-million different logos and features on the box. Its not a bad thing, but at least it doesn’t have a rocket ship on it. Opening up the box you are greeted to a few basic accessories. You get four SATA cables, a manual, driver disk, SLI cable and a Gigabyte case sticker. I really wish they had included a longer crossfire cable as well since most crossfire cables are only made to extend over two additional slots. You will have to go and buy an extended crossfire cable if you plan on running crossfire in the top two slots.
The board itself is really a nice looking board. It is feature packed, but also not overloaded with features if that makes sense. This board was really giving me mixed signals throughout the whole review process. For every great thing I found, there was something that somewhat let me down. For example, there are voltage read points so that you can manually check your voltages with a multimeter. And on the downside a section of the VRM’s doesn’t have heatsinks. On the whole though the board is great hardware-wise and you can’t really ask for too much more at this price tag.
The layout itself is good. There is sufficient spacing in case you have one of those GPU’s that takes up three slots. Around the socket it is not overly filled with caps and other items so for people that need to insulate the board for sub-zero benchmarking this board is ideal.In the middle of the board there is a connector for a mini-SSD to plug right into the board. This allows you to enable caching so you can get the feel of a full-blown SSD but using your mechanical hard drive.
Two things that disapointed me were only having six SATA ports and only six USB3 ports on the back pannel. Having more SATA ports would have been great, but it also would have brought up the price so I can’t really fault Gigabyte too much since this isn’t the flagship board. But I can fault Gigabyte for their really weird backpannel area. You get DVI,VGA,HDMI and Display port connections for an integrated video card. This in my eyes does not make sense at all. Gigabyte very easily could have cut that down to DVI and HDMI and thrown in a couple of adapters for the other connections. People that run off of the IGPU aren’t likely going to run a 4-monitor setup so why waste space that could be two to four more USB ports?
The rest of the board is well spaced and you even get an oldschool PCI slot for people hanging onto an old sound card or other expansion card. I had no problems fitting a GPU that takes up 3-slots and still keeping the secondary 16x pcie slot open.
For people that are concerned about some of the VRM’s not being covered it is not really a big deal. Throughout testing I kept a low-speed fan blowing near them and temps were about room temperature while touching them even at very high overclocks. It just would have been nice if they covered them so that it gives the board a better look.
A couple of things that really impressed me were the Voltage read points and the physical power, reset, and bios reset buttons on the board. For overclocking these are lifesavers. It is nice that Gigabyte has hardcore overclockers in mind.
