GIGABYTE EP45 Extreme Exclusive Shots

GIGABYTE today answered to the Foxconn BLACKOPS board, with what they call the EP45 Extreme motherboard for overclockers. It may not offer you 4-in-1 cooling like the BLACKOPS does, but as you can see from the pictures there's plenty of copper all over the board's two main chips and the 12-phase PWM area, so this will do the work quite well too. The final board will also have onboard power and reset switches, but they are missing from this early sample. The Post 80 debug LED is also a new feature for this GIGABYTE board. Additionally GIGABYTE is planning to supply later a LN2 duct for the CPU and a watercooling module for the chipset. Finally the board has six SATA ports, single IDE port, dual Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1-channel HD audio, three PCI slots, three x16 PCIe slots, GIGABYTE's Dual BIOS and a new revision of DES.