EP45-DQ6 Onboard Devices

Gigabyte uses all six of the ICH10R’s PCI Express lanes for a single x1 slot and five onboard devices.

Gigabyte’s port panel is filled with USB and Gigabit Network connections, but that means it lacks several other key elements such as eSATA and FireWire. Few users will have eight USB 2.0 devices that they want to be plugged into the back, and we’d have preferred to see a couple of these ports moved to a third front-panel header. At least the full set of audio connections is provided, with digital optical and digital coaxial connections, plus enough analog channels to support 7.1 surround output, line-level input, and a stereo microphone simultaneously.

We didn’t mention that the number of internal Serial ATA ports totaled ten on the previous page because four of these are meant to be used with included eSATA breakout cables. Of course they can still be used internally, but the four we speak of now have a couple other things in common. Two Silicon Image SIL5723 “SteelVine” port multipliers connect the four ports to two SATA links supplied by the Gigabyte SATA2 controller. That means that each drive pair relies on a single 3.0 Gb/s link, and that each pair will appear as a single SteelVine drive to the chipset and OS. Furthermore, both SteelVine controllers are limited by the SATA2 controller’s PCI Express x1 interface to only 250MB/s, which is a significant handicap for RAID 0 configurations of more than two drives.

SteelVine controllers have a few additional features, such as drive cascading and hardware RAID 1/0 capability, as we discussed in our technical analysis

Gigabyte uses PCI Express to provide the best possible performance to four Realtek RTL8111C Gigabit Ethernet controllers. The first two are easy to find at the EP45-DQ6’s rear edge.

The fourth Gigabit network controller is located beneath the chipset-to-VRM heatpipes. Due to the high number of onboard devices Gigabyte had to get stealthy with the third controller, hiding it beneath the battery! All four controllers can be combined in teaming mode for network speeds of up to four gigabits per second.

The Texas Instruments TSB43AB23 three-port IEEE-1394 FireWire controller is hidden with a little less stealth beneath the extended portion of the x16 length, x8 mode secondary graphics card slot.

Gigabyte uses the Realtek ALC889A to provide eight channel output (7.1 surround) with separate headphone channels for audio multi-streaming. The codec is rated at an impressive 107db signal-to-noise ratio.