Gigabyte EP45-DS3R & EP45-Extreme Motherboard Reviews

• HardwareLogic: Gigabyte EP45-Extreme Motherboard Review:
  
  

  “The EP45-Extreme is filled with so many features and options that it should keep any overclocker entertained for a long time. Gigabyte used the excellent P45 chipset to put together an impressive product that features the Hybrid Silent Pipe cooling system along with a highly tweakable BIOS. And throughout my overclocking adventures with this board, the temperatures stayed remarkable cool.
  
  The board didn't come without its faults. The SATA port orientation needs to be adressed, especially with long, dual slot videocards becoming the norm. I also wish AUTO settings would take overclocking farther than it did. And a fact you will have to keep in mind is the upcoming release of Nehalem later on this year from Intel. Can you hold out with your current system until then? Its something that I'll bring up until then and with all the LGA 775 boards that are released. Of course a fantastic board like the EP45-Extreme could hold you over as the new technology comes down in price and the bugs get fixed. You will have to make the decision based on your plans for the system.”

  
  Click here to read the full review.
  
  
  
• PC Perspective: GIGABYTE GA-EP45-DS3R Motherboard Review‏:
  
  

  “Performance was great out of the box and the EP45-DS3R just worked like it should. It performed exactly where it should have, at stock settings for the P45 chipset. That might seem like a minor statement with little significance, but I cant tell you have many boards I have had to tweak right off the bat, just to achieve proper stock performance and stability. The only setting I manipulated right away, was the energy conserving features, and that was just for the purpose of the review. Everything just plugged in, auto detected correctly, and went to work.
  
  Even though this board is targeted at the mainstream user, and lacks any kind of flashy heatpipe cooling, it has a plethora of tweaking options in the BIOS second to none. The BIOS was basically identical in functionality, to the more expensive EP45-DQ6 enthusiast version. It achieved a very respectable FSB ceiling for a mainstream product, with the Q9550 Quad Core CPU, while using conservative voltage settings.”

  
  Click here to read the full review.