Originally Posted by Hardware Canucks
Looking directly from the side, we can see a thin base plate that makes contact with the P45 NB, but sitting directly above that, is a series of cooling fins. These fins then attach to the nice and thick upper plate that has the water block, provides the base for the Hybrid Silent-Pipe Module, and finally the heat pipes that then carry on to the PWM areas.
Our question to Gigabyte is, how exactly do you think the water block, Hybrid Silent-Pipe Module, or those heat pipes are going to remove heat from the chipset? The cooling fins in between the two layers of the whole assembly are for dissipating heat, not transferring it. There is very little mass in contact with the chipset which is required to absorb large heat loads when the system is really being pushed. The argument here then is that the P45 chipset runs cool. Well, if it runs so cool, what is all this elaborate cooling for then? Is a water block even necessary? What about the heat pipes that are supposed to be transferring heat to the PWM area where the cooling fins then dissipate the heat? To put it bluntly, this design is probably the most inefficient we have seen to date. You can see the photos, come to your own conclusions.
I think it is high time motherboard manufacturers took a step back and started designing cooling solutions based on performance, not how it looks esthetically on a board because what we are looking at here with the GA-EP45T-Extreme is a great design ruined by what looks like a solution a marketing intern came up with.
