Gigabyte GA-G1975X

     The physical layout of the G1-Turbo shouldn't present any unique challenges to the system builder. All of the cooing fans are well protected, so dangling wires won't get unexpectedly shredded when you hit the power button. There is plenty of room around the CPU socket for after-market coolers. In fact, with the extra ventilation supplied by the Turbo Jets, water cooling setups would work very well because there would still be plenty of airflow around all the major components.

     A close up of the memory slots really shows off just how much room we have to work with, the TurboJet system doesn't impede with much at all here. Color coded memory slots makes dual-channel setup a breeze, and the other connectors and power fan header are all plainly marked. The board does have two IDE connectors, but only one is attached to the Intel chipset itself. The other is a GigaRAID parallel ATA connector which can be defined as either RAID or a standard ATA-133 channel. Both the large 20/24-pin ATX power connector, and the 6/4 pin 12-volt auxiliary power connectors are shown above. Both are also shown with optional filler plugs installed so if your power supply only has a 20-pin or 4-pin plug you can just leave the unused pins covered.

     The south side of the board is full of the normal headers and connectors. The four SATA channels are connected with Gigabyte's own locking cables, which prevent the SATA connectors from coming loose while your moving your rig from one LAN party to the next. The parallel IDE connector is the GigaRAID channel I mentioned earlier. The GigaRAID works great as a regular ATA133 channel and even supports optical drives. The low profile south bridge heatsink has been placed behind the two PCI slots, so really big video cards won't be blocked by anything. But, really big video cards may block the PCI slots themselves. If you notice, the two standard PCI express slots have been placed at the very bottom of the board. This breaks from their more traditional placement between the PCI-E x16 slots.

     The Dual Bios feature is one of Gigabyte's claim to fame. Giving overclockers and other extreme enthusiasts a means to backup a known good bios and tweak their current systems to the breaking point. In the case of BIOS corruption, simply reload the boards BIOS from the backup and you're back in business. Agh USB, and there's lots of it. The back panel only has two USB ports (which we'll see in a moment) so Gigabyte has given users the extra ports needed to bring more USB into play. The two light yellow and one green set of headers are all for USB, so that 6 extra ports!