Photos Part Two: The Motherboard
As always, be careful about static when you handle electronic stuff. There is little worse than building your new computer and getting nothing when you hit the power button because you toasted the motherboard with static. An explosion would be worse, though significantly more exciting (I’ve had it happen during extreme benching, it gets your attention!), but static won’t cause that. In any case, anti-static precautions are recommended!
It looks like a motherboard! Imagine that? The heatsinks are almost excessively large, which is just how I like them. They’re set well back from the socket though and shouldn’t cause any issues with big CPU heatsinks.
There isn’t much to see on the rear, the only components are MOSFETs under the CPU power bits and a singular capacitor under the CPU socket. It’s very nice to see that the heatsinks are attached with screws, this makes me happy.
Here we have the front panel connectors, very well labeled as always, the BIOS switch (not well labeled) and one of the non-chipset SATA3 ports.
Very useful stuff for OCing, here we have dual power phases for the RAM, plus clear CMOS, reset and power buttons. Also present is a POST code display and a bunch of voltage read points. It’d be more convenient if they had some plugs on them, as it is you’ll need a steady hand with a multimeter or to solder some wires on. Of course if you solder wires on I expect your warranty evaporates.
The CPU socket is surrounded by power bits as usual, 15 phases worth to be specific. How they are laid out is not immediately apparant, but I expect it to be 12+2+1. Those 12 CPU power phases are likely six pairs rather than 12 individual phases, I’m not aware of a buck controller that can run 12 individual phases.
This means that we get the current/power capabilities of 12 phases but the ripple of six phases. We’ll look at the controller next and see if we can figure things out a bit.
See that line of six brown jobbies, each with a little black bt above and below each end? Those are the OCP bits for the six CPU power phases. The other two very similar capacitors in the upper right corner are two additional phases that head off to the CPU socket area as well, what they’re powering I don’t know. VCCSA or VTT are the likely suspects. IR bought CHiL recently, so if this setup looks familiar that’s why.
The socket is a standard 1155 operation, nothing new here:
Lots of filter caps inside there, one space is left unpopulated for unknown reasons.
Just above the VRM control IC is a connector labeled “HP_PWR”. According to the manual this is the connector that power the heatsink LEDs. Of course, there aren’t any heatsink LEDs so this connector is left unpopulated. Why it is here is one of the great mysteries of life. It puts out 12 V, so if you want a heatsink LED you can install one (with the proper resistor(s) of course).
The rear IO options are long on monitor plugs and short on USB, we have the full size version of all modern (and vaguely modern, it’s been a bit since VGA was modern) monitor plugs. Plus optical SPDIF, Firewire, eSATA(6Gbps), four USB3 ports, two USB2 ports, two Ethernet ports and the usual six plug audio tower.
If you’re installing an older OS be sure to plug your keyboard into one of those two red ports, as the USB3 ports will require drivers. If you’re installing a really old OS that doesn’t have native USB support, forget it.
Here we have a SATA power connector to feed more 12 V to the PCIe slots for SLI/Crossfire use. SATA seems like an odd choice to me as it can handle the least power of the three logical options. Still, with dual card SLI/CFX you probably won’t need much extra.
Really you probably won’t need any extra at all unless you’re running the cards wildly overvolted and cooled with dry ice or liquid nitrogen. We also see one of the extra USB3 connectors.
Two more USB3 connectors lurk at the bottom right of the board. So far I’ve only run into one case that had two USB3 plugs, the Bitfenix Shinobi XL. With that case and the 3.5″ adaptor that comes with this motherboard you could have SIX USB3 plugs on the front of the case, plus four more on the rear. That’s some serious connectivity.
Lastly, three pictures of it installed. Starting with the mSATA drive installed. Installing the mSATA drive was surprisingly easy as Gigabyte has found or designed a clip mechanism to replace the usual screw holes. This is very nice.
That’s 256GB of very fast storage. Slightly excessive for SRT, but perfectly functional as a boot drive or as the only drive in a system!
The board’s color scheme fits in quite nicely with my build, I like it. The power button on the board glows when the board is plugged into a PSU, nice and easy to find that way.
Now let’s see if it works!
