Gigabyte G Power Lite

Gigabyte G-Power Lite

Getting the G Power Lite to mount on your AMD system uses this little device. Requiring a whole lot less manual coordination than the Pentium method, this is almost like mounting a standard heatsink onto the socket. You do have to reach under the suspended heatsink just a bit, but all in all this is as easy as it gets.

Here we see the Gigabyte G-Power Lite mounted to the socket of the Asus A8N32-SLI. Asus has adapted heatpipe technology a whole new way by using it to cool all of the critical components on the motherboard. The nVIDIA nForce4 x16 chipset introduced a Southbridge to AMD motherboards which Asus has linked with the MCP (northbridge) and the voltage rectifier MOSFETS in a daisy chain of heatpipe cooling. While the performance of the board is outstanding, the support forums are alive with users reporting high motherboard temperatures.

The Asus A8N32-SLI heatpipe is cooled by a set of fins which are placed over the MOSFETs. These are designed to use air circulated by the CPU's heatsink. Asus provides a blower style fan which can be placed on this fin array, but warns to only do so if you are using liquid cooling or some type of passive cooling which provides no airflow. With this cooler installed, that blower fan simply will not fit. Also, it shouldn't be necessary because there will be plenty of air circulated underneath the heatsink of the G-Power Lite.

Testing with the AMD CPU

Testing here will happen much like it did with Intel CPU. Temperatures were taken through out testing with the focus being the idle and 100% max load. The idle temperature is an average of temperatures taken over a 30 minute span of idle system operation. The 100% maximum temperature is an average of the processors temperature over a 30 minute cycle after operating at 100% for 45 minutes. The CPU used in this test will be the Athlon64 3700+ with a San Diego core which will be overclocked to 2.7Ghz at default voltage for the entire duration of testing.

Load	°F / °C
Idle	93 °F 33.8 °C
100%	115 °F 46.1 °C

Conclusion....

As processors continue to get faster, it's sure nice to know that we can also rely on a quiet cooling solution to keep the system running. Especially, after suffering through all those years with loud turbo-jet fans. While overclockers may not be able to enjoy a perfectly quiet computer, the G-Power Lite can get you awful close. More importantly is the high value the G-Power Lite has by being universal to both Intel and AMD systems. All in all, a very solid cooler.

Club Overclocker Rating
Innovation:	9.5 out of 10
Performance:	9.5 out of 10
Quality:	9.5 out of 10
Stability:	N/A
Overclocking:	N/A
Software/Drivers Pack:	N/A
Value:	10 out of 10
Overall Rating 9.5

Skill Level
Project Skill Level (10 being hardest)	4 out of 10