Gigabyte GA-EP45T-Extreme Motherboard Review

The leads sticking through to the underside of the motherboard provide the read points for vCORE and vMCH which can be seen in the first photo. Any of the circled leads should give the same reading for the appropriate component. The vTT and vPLL voltage read points are a bit smaller and impossible to get at without removing the stock cooling and can be seen in the second photo above. The third photo outlines the read points for vDIMM and is a bit tricky to get to while running. The inside of the capacitor pointed toward the DIMM slot is the end you can read from. All voltage readings using the DMM were grounded on the ground of an open fan header in the lower left portion of the motherboard. Let's now take a look at the voltage chart for the GA-EP45T-Extreme.

What you select in the BIOS is pretty close to what you get with this board for the most part. We have already mentioned the slight vDIMM over voltage which happens throughout the voltage spectrum but everything else we could measure seemed to be pretty close. vCORE obviously has some vDROOP on this board when going from idle to load and there is a pinch of drop from what is selected in the BIOS to what is being supplied at idle. Un-like some other motherboards, there is no option in the BIOS to eliminate vDROOP but it isn't that bad with our setup. Obviously a quad core is going to uncover a little more vDROOP but we don't have a quad core on hand to test for that. Here is the vCORE chart from a quick 30 minute OCCT run at our XMP settings.

vCORE Chart from OCCT

Again, the vDROOP is there, but it is solid as a rock. There is very little variation of the vCORE indicating a nice clean supply of power going to the CPU.

We are not going to continue to harp on Gigabyte for the heat sink design here. We think we got our point across in the layout section. Despite the fact that the design is rather clumsy and poorly thought out, it still has the ability to cool the chip set of the motherboard well, even under pretty intense conditions as we saw in the FSB testing section. Running the system stable at 1.50 vMCH at 550FSB with a Performance Level of 10 does me the chip set heat sink does its job well. It still doesn't mean we have to like it though.

There clearly is a lack of design, and thought that went into the chip set heat sink design and if there was an on-die temperature sensor, it would be easily proven. We just don't think that there is any need to water cool this chip set, and especially not in the manner the stock heat sink does it. It really does add cost to the board and sure while it may appear that the board is a premium board with the Hybrid-Silent Pipe, it definitely helps make the GA-EP45T-Extreme carry a premium price tag.