Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P P45 Motherboard Review

At first glance the overall layout of this board is excellent. The ATX power connector, the 8-pin CPU power connector, the floppy connector, the IDE connector and four of the SATA ports are all placed at the most convenient location: the edge of the motherboard. We would have liked to have seen the other four SATA ports relocated to the motherboard's edge, possibly in a 90 degree angle configuration, but nothing is perfect. There is also a sizeable gap between the two physical PCI-E x16 slots, which should ensure that almost any aftermarket VGA cooling can be utilized. Overall, it is abudantly clear that GIGABYTE has been listening to our collective constructive criticisms and have made some great layout changes. Now let’s take a closer look at the individual sections:

As you can see, the general CPU socket area on this motherboard is relatively unobstructed. Although surrounded by the northbridge and mosfet coolers and a few solid capacitors, there should be no clearance issues with most CPU coolers or water blocks. The EP45-UD3P comes with a six-phase power design, consisting of three Low RDS(on) MOSFETs per channel and small environmentally-sealed R50 low power loss ferrite core chokes. Now six phases might not seem like a lot in this age of twelve to sixteen-phase voltage regulation systems, but this model supports 30 amps per phase and can deliver a total of 180 amps to the CPU, which is overkill even for extremely overclocked quad-core processors.

The cooling system on the EP45-UD3P is elegantly simple. The aluminium northbridge heatsink and one of the MOSFET heatsinks are connected via a thick heat pipe, while the top MOSFETs cooler is independent. We will be testing the efficacy of this new cooling system a little later.

In this first image, you can spot the phase LED display which illuminates based on the number of power phases in use, but only when the Dynamic Energy Saver software is running. You can also see the two-phase power design that Gigabyte have included for the memory slots, ensuring consistent power delivery to your DDR2 modules. Of course there is also the CPU fan header in its standard location.

Next we have the slightly garrish, but well-spaced red and yellow memory slots. As previously mentioned, the floppy connector and 24-pin ATX power connector are smartly positioned on the edge of the motherboard. One of two system fan headers is also visible. Before anyone asks, we are not sure whether retail units will ship with those aesthetically disruptive stickers.

Starting at the bottom right, we see the two purple SATA ports, which are capable of RAID 0, RAID 1 and JBOD. These two ports are controlled by the Gigabyte-branded JMicron storage processor, which also runs the IDE connector. The six yellow ports come from the ICH10R southbridge, and support RAID 0/1/5/10. In the middle we have the southbridge, which is cooled by a small push-pin heatsink. The two ICs with green dots on them are the dual BIOS chips, and above them is the Infineon Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip. On the left edge of the motherboard you can see the two yellow USB headers and grey FireWire (IEEE 1394) header.

The overall expansion slot layout and assortment is very good, the only minor issues are that the third PCI-E x1 slot and the bottom PCI slot become unusable if a dual-slot graphics card is placed in the nearest PCI-E x16 slot. However, dual-slot graphics cards inevitably block slots on every motherboard, so it is not actually a design flaw.

Starting from the right, we have the ITE IT8718 chip I/O controller, which is responsible for hardware monitoring, fan speed controling, as well as supplying the legacy floppy support. To the left of it, we have the Realtek ALC889A high definition audio module, and then one of the two Realtek 8111C Gigabyte LAN controller chips, which runs on the PCI-Express bus. The other Realtek 8111C chip is located to the left of the northbridge cooler.

The rear I/O panel is pretty packed for a motherboard in this price range. There are two Gigabit LAN ports, eight USB ports, two types of FireWire ports, six audio jacks, optical and coaxial S/PDIF connectors, and lastly the PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports. Also, let’s not forget the two eSATA ports on the PCI expansion bracket.