Posted on Tuesday, September 23 2008 @ 17:31 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
TweakTown
had a close look at the upcoming Gigabyte X58 Extreme motherboard:
Today we got a close up look at the final design that will ship to customers, besides the heatsink cooling setup, which GIGABYTE is still keeping under wraps for the moment - and this one is an actual working live sample. Besides the physical changes to the board layout, on this board and others, GIGABYTE will be introducing “Ultra Durable 3”. GIGABYTE has already tweaked their boards to what we thought was the max and we really thought there wasn’t much more left to improve, but we were wrong.
UD3 adds two 2 ounce copper layers to the 12-layer PCB motherboard – one is a ground layer and the other is a power layer. We got a chance to see the actual copper layers that slot into the regular PCB compared to normal one ounce copper layers, but we are not allowed to show you until the actual launch tomorrow. These thicker copper layers create less resistance (impedance) by up to two times, creating better electrical current flow according to GIGABYTE. In their labs, engineers measured a 50 degree Celsius drop in temperature in the hottest parts of the motherboard (mosfets around the CPU).
