P67A-UD7 Most In-Depth Preview/Review!!

[sin0822]

The Brand New Cooling Solution Put to The Test!
Motherboard Cooling:

I have come too really like this new cooling design on this motherboard. Not only is it a break from the traditional heatsinks with fins, it is also very chic. Chic is an odd word to use for something like heatsinks, but I’m not just referring to the heat sinks, this new cooling apparatus complements the new motherboard design very well. The motherboard is very well dressed with 4 main heatsinks that are attached by no less than 3 black copper heat pipes. They are clamped down very well to the heatsinks. The bottom of the heatsinks is lapped, good for thermal contact.

The whole system does it job as if it were the employee of the month. Not only did GIGABYTE use aluminum blocks, and have them precisely molded to resemble a radiator type design, but they also put gold accents on the heatsinks that basically sells the board. The seal between the heatsinks and the ICs is very tight, and should not be disturbed, so I took it apart to show you what it is made of. Please do not take the heatsinks off and apply your own thermal paste, there is no point because GIGABYTE put a lot of effort into the whole design, from thermal paste to thermal pads that do not need to be replaced.

These gold accents have an eye-catching design, I don’t know who designed the cooling for this board but I would love to send them a thank you card. I would like to mention that this cooling solution makes the board very heavy, as the heatsinks alone carry a lot of weight, but that is a good thing because they can hold more heat, and with proper airflow disperse it.

The Mosfet Drivers are cooled by two rows of heatsinks, one on the left carries the number 7 in gold, and the other on top is smaller and doesn’t carry any lettering.

The PCH is cooled by its own low profile block (to not block long PCI-E GPUs) of aluminum and carries the GIGABYTE name in gold. The main heatsink on the NF200 sits where the Northbridge or IOH would be on traditional boards, it has Ultra Durable written on top, and has an angled cut on its underside to allow the Low RSD Mosfets and Ferrite Core Chokes to sit undisturbed and get some airflow.

I would also like to mention that the heatsinks are held together by screws that make it easier to produce the same basic anodized silver/gray heatsinks and then add gold accents for the UD7 and blue for the UD5.

Moving on to one of my gripes with many motherboards, their use of plastic push-pins to hold down heatsinks. A round of applause for GIGABYTE would be in order because they used 10 metal screws with springs and black rubber O-rings, a perfect design to compliment a perfect cooling apparatus. This is an improvement on the GA-X58A series which used two screws and 10 plastic push pins.

When I first saw the cooling design, I thought to myself, is this really going to cool the components that well? I decided to put the cooling to the test. I had to devise a way to show performance without using the PCH, NF200, or mosfets to heat up the cooling apparatus, so I did the next best thing, I took apart my array of 10W 10omh resistors and used a few to heat up the heatsink. Artificial testing here we come!

I know this picture is scary but no worries I am not modding the motherboard, I just felt like scaring you! The motherboard is probably perfect and doesn’t need any voltage modifications. I am using everything in the picture, including three digital temperature probes. They are pretty cheap but do the job well, my thermocouple was down, and so I used these thermal probes instead; they do the job very well. As you can see in the next picture both meters together show the same exact temperature which is ambient temp (it’s hot in here). Each meter has 3 probes attached to it and is wired to use each when switched to the certain probe. I will use only 3 probes for this experiment, as the other 3 are already integrated into my main pc.




Experiment #1 Heat dispersion:
This test shows me how well heat is dispersed from one heatsink to another as well as from the bottom of the heatsink to the top. One temperature probe for the resistor is placed between the resistor and the NF200 heatsink, another temperature probe is placed on top of NF200 heatsink, and then the last probe is placed on the bottom of the PCH heatsink to see how well the heat pipe transfers heat. Then I moved the probe from the top of the NF200 heatsink over to the top of the PCH Heatsink. Two 10 watt resistors are used, they get very hot to the touch and cannot be touched, they are powered by 12v with no limit on amperage, and they are held together by their soldering, then I add an extra bit of thermal past to the lapped surface of the NF200 heatsink, and tie them down with zip ties, the probe is in-between the resistors and HS.


Test #1 results:


As you can see the difference between the bottom of NF200 HS/top of resistor is a few degrees difference, about 3C in the beginning. When the heatsink starts to heat up that difference increases a small amount. The fact that it is within 10C is amazing, most high-end air coolers have a problem keeping within 10 of surface temp of the chip, but I believe because these blocks are one solid piece they are able to transfer heat much more effectively. When we move over to the PCH, which is heated through the heatpipe we can see heat exchange is very good, in the beginning there is a 3-6C difference. Once heat gets up to a point it seems that the vaporization that takes place inside the copper heatpipe transfers heat much more effectively when heated. We see the 6C difference decrease to only a few degrees, this indicated that the clamp and connection between aluminum block and copper heatpipe was done correctly. In the final moments of the test, I moved the probe from the top of the NF200 heatsink to the top of the PCH heatsink. While the heat is less on the PCH, the transfer of heat is about the same as from bottom of the NF200 HS to the top of the NF200 heatsink, this is most likely due to the fact that both are solid blocks and specific heat is the same for both blocks, so heat transfer would be about the same which we see is the case.


Experiment #2: Heat Transfer. In this experiment I will add 3 more 10 watt resistors to the mix, and zip-tie them down to the mosfet heatsinks. I will use the stock thermal pad that is already there, because I want to test the system as is. In the past GIGABYTE used very thin heat pads, as is the case here. One thermometer is placed on the bottom of the NB block as usual, then one is placed on the PCH HS on top, and the third is placed on top of the mosfets HS on top. In the beginning I will let the system heat up to 50C (These resistors go up to 70C when on the original HS I had them on before testing), and then place a fan (silent 1500 rpm fan), to mimic case airflow. Please do understand that I am generating 50 watts, the NF200 is supposedly rated at 12W and the driver mosfets will be about 1 watt (at 5 amps a piece(24x5=120amps) which is more than enough) each under load conditions with all 24 activated, so that is 36 watts + PCH which I do not know. This 50 watt array of resistors is to mimic a heavily overclocked system, please take into consideration that not all 50 watts will be concentrated in the areas which they are in this test.

Test #2 results:


The system reacted as I thought it would, temperature quickly increases to 50C in under 90secs, the PCH’s heatsink really increased heat, but not as much as I expected, I was thinking that the increased heat from the mosfet resistors would add more heat to the resistor free PCH heatsink, but I was very surprised. The large amount of aluminum used for these heatsinks absorbs a good amount of heat, this then heats up the copper heatpipe and heat starts to transfer. In this case PCH temperature was only 2-3C higher than expected, but it is heat transfer none the less. When the fan as applied, it cooled down the heatsinks, but it took a few minutes, this is due to the heat capacity of the aluminum used for the heatsinks. The temperatures did drop a fair bit, which I did not expect because these resistors putout constant heat. The heat dissipated rather slowly but in a computer case this would be just fine because the constant airflow would be enough to cool the system.

The results from both tests happily surprised me. The new heatsinks do their job flawlessly and provide added elegance to the board. Performance under heavy load and even sub-zero benchmarks should be excellent. This board’s cooling is really one of a kind, and it looks like GIGABYTE put a lot of money into R&D for this specific design.