Layout

The Gigabyte GA-6PXSV3 comes with a blue coloured PCB and black expansion slots. It's really nice that Gigabyte is also thinking about the look of their workstation motherboards. Most other manufacturers are still offering their workstation/server motherboards with a non painted green PCB.
Regarding the expansion slots here you find three. Two third gen PCIe x16 working at x16 and one second gen PCIe x4 working at x2. There is always one slot space between them to make a SLI/CrossFire possible. Too bad that the PCIe x4 is only working at x2 link, one can't take advantage of it installing an OCZ RevoDrive3 x2 for example as you will be limited to a 1 GB/s bandwidth.



Gigabyte equipped this workstation motherboard with a power design that offers six phases for the CPU and each set of four DIMM memory gets another two phases. As you can see from the picture below the phases haven't been doubled, you have one choke per one MOSFET. The digital PWM controller that drives the CPU power stage is an IR3536 from International Rectifier. For each memory power stage you find an IR3541 from the same manufacturer. MOSFETs from both CPU and memory power stages are all IR3550M. Last but not least Gigabyte went for high quality chokes from Coiltronics. The printing ontop of them reads 1007R3-R15. After checking the datasheets you find that these ferrite core chokes can cope with up to 61 Amps. In other words this power design is badass.



Totally you'll find two sets of two times two DIMM-slots on the GA-6PXSV3. Means there are eight memory slots for a total amount up to 64GB of Unbuffered memory and 256GB of Registered memory. Officially supported are the following clock speeds: DDR3- 1600 / 1333 / 1066 MHz. Memory slots are quite close to the CPU socket so you won't be able to fit memory with oversized heatspreaders along with a huge CPU cooler. But that's not really a problem as most sub 1600 MHz UDIMM and RDIMM memory modules don't have heatspreaders at all or low profile ones.



Southbridge as well as current converters are being held at adequate temperatures via passive cooling blocks made from aluminium. They are well finished but the one for the MOSFETs can be easily moved from right to left like on Intel motherboards. That's because of the "cheap" rentention mechanism, a piece of plastic with a spring.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 9 - Synthetic - Memory & Cache Bandwidth/Latency
Page 2 - Specifications / Delivery	Page 10 - Synthetic - Cryptography & Arithmetic
Page 3 - Layout	Page 11 - Synthetic - Multi-Media & Mutli-Core Efficiency
Page 4 - Connectors and I/O	Page 12 - Real World - Office Productivity & Data Analysis
Page 5 - BIOS	Page 13 - Real World - System Management
Page 6 - Test setup	Page 14 - Real World - Media Creation & 3D Modeling
Page 7 - Synthetic - WPrime1024 & UCBench 2011	Page 15 - Conclusion
Page 8 - Synthetic - CineBench

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