GA-X58A-UD5 Revision 2.0 the MOST in Depth Review/ Analysis

[sin0822]

Gigabyte decked out the UD5 rev 2.0 with some nice heatsinks. On the topside of the board you have hefty heatsinks that use a thermal pad to make contact with the mosfet drivers, as they do get very hot. The top heatsink is attached to the rest of the system by 1 heat pipe, and the larger mosfet heatsink is attached to the Northbridge heatsink by 2 heat pipes.



The Northbridge heatsink does its job well, and instead of using a thermal pad, it uses thermal paste. Upon analysis it was some sort of silver based thermal paste, and the good thing is that it did not bake to the chipset; removal of the heatsink array was easy.



The Northbridge heatsink is bolted down to the motherboard, while the mosfet and Southbridge heatsinks uses plastic push pins. What is very nice is that Gigabyte’s Southbridge heatsink is no gimmick. In the whole heatsink array there is not any copper but on the Southbridge. This piece of copper sits on top of the Southbridge separated by thermal pad, and is attached to the heat pipe.



The Southbridge heatsink also cools down the Gigabyte SATA2 chip. Here is where gigabyte really pays attention to cooling, the 4 mosfet drivers for the Northbridge are cooled down by their own separate tiny heatsink, while Gigabyte uses a thermal pad here as well, you can feel the heatsink and it does get pretty hot.

Small HS ON then OFF:


Whenever a heatsink gets hot you know it’s doing its job, and well the gigabyte heatsinks get very hot, yet we never see Northbridge temperatures above 40C at stock and 50C overclocked, that is without supporting fans cooling everything down, but the heatsink temperature is another story, measured at stock load the heatsinks get up to about 70C and at overclock about 80-90C if you average them all out, the most heat ends up at the Northbridge cooler as its where all the heat pipes meet, and the cooler is perfect for a small 40mm or 60mm fan, yet gigabyte does not provide one, because it isn’t really necessary with the north bridge temperatures being that low. It would have been nice though. As you can see the heat moves from the block to the fins, on the UD7 on top of the fins is a waterblock, not the most effective way to design a cooling apparatus, but easy to implement because you can switch out the waterblock for the “silent hybrid” heat pipe apparatus the UD5 does not come with and the UD7 and UD9 do get.