Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P P45 Motherboard Review

As you can see, the northbridge and MOSFET coolers do not interfere with the Thermalright Ultra-120 heatsink and should not have any compatibility issues with most popular CPU cooler. Having said that, we have seen some third-party pictures indicating that the mounting bracket on Tuniq Tower 120 comes into contact with the northbridge cooler, so keep that in mind.

The memory slots are spaced far enough away from the CPU socket so that even very wide heatsinks should not hang over the DIMM slots nor come into contact with tall heatspreaders. Likewise, the memory slot clips do not come into contact with the back of the graphics card.

These two images demonstrate how GIGABYTE's engineers have finally managed to ensure that graphics cards will not interfere or block SATA ports...by putting the ports BEHIND the graphics cards, pure genius! All SATA ports are accessible no matter what graphics card configuration you choose.

We only encountered to minor issues during our installation. First, as mentioned previously, a single-slot graphics card installed in the second PCI-E x16 slot can potentially block the bottom PCI slot, while a dual-slot model will definitely block the slot. Secondly, depending on your choice of CPU cooler and the direction that you install it in, there can be a clearance issue between the 8-pin CPU power connector and the CPU fan. The simple solution is to plug in the power connector before installating the fan and perhaps bend the cable a bit.