Turbo Cooling



Gigabyte engineers should be commended for their implementation of "Turbo Cooling" on this board. Healthy skeptics might expect the cooling apparatus moniker to hype another marketing ploy; however, in this case the technology is as pragmatic as its extreme. Thermal management is literally a "hot topic" as heat is the number one cause for performance degradation, system instability and premature system failure. For the Overclocker or Gamer heat is their nemesis and dedicated enthusiasts will go to any length to keep their systems cool. While I've had many motherboards in my paws and just as many cooling solutions, Gigabyte's Turbo alternative holds a lot of promise.





As stated previously the "Turbo" in the title represents an extensive ventilation system simultaneously cooling the North Bridge's copper finned heatsink, mosfets, all aspects of the 8-phase power circuitry, the CPU socket area and even memory, albeit partial.





The upper "turbo-shaft" inlet is located a few mm's above the DIMMs and should remove heat as it rises from the memory. The bottom shaft also draws heat off the DIMM nearest to it although its primary purpose is to cool the NB.





Below we take a look at the Gigabyte in action replacing OCZ's GOLD 6400 with Crucial Ballistix Tracer 5300. Watercooling provided by Alphacool's NexXxos XP (mated with CAPE CORA 642, Alphacool AP1510 pump and Coolplex reservoir).



Onto specs ->