Gigabyte GA-X48-DQ6 mainboard

It certainly has been a while since we reviewed something from Gigabyte so for that reason alone I figured it's a good time to grab one of their mainboards and have a peek at the current status of their products.

Luckily enough Gigabyte was figuring the same thing as they recently released an Intel X48 based mainboard that needed a review. Pretty high-end gear for sure as Intels X48 chipset brings support for the all new 1600 Mhz FSB processors, two 16x PCI-E 2.0 slots, which you can use for ATI CrossFire, two ATI graphics cards and heaps of niche features.

Conversely, NVIDIA is keeping SLI to themselves with a small exception here and there, so there's no SLI support - for that, you'll need to buy an Intel D5400XS Skulltrail motherboard or an NVIDIA nForce chipset board.

What's so new about X48 opposed to the previous X38 you might ask .. well the only difference between the X48 and the X38 chipsets is the official support for 400MHz FSB (1,600MHz effective) CPUs. And let me restate 'official' there as the X38 mainboards can do that FSB perfectly well if you get the latest BIOS.

But hey ... this is where we land a the premises of Gigabyte, they make pretty dandy mainboards and especially their high end series always have some cool features that'll tickly your brain and make you all gigly.

Today we test their GA-X48-DQ6 mainboard, obviously based on that Intel X48 chipset as a basis, yet with a bucket load of additional features.

Let's have a peek.