Today we take a look at Gigabyte’s highest-end X48 chipset based motherboard- the X48T-DQ6. Based on DDR3, this board features Gigabyte’s “6-Quad”technologies that, among other things, allow minimize power consumption with maximum performance.

Packaging

Gigabyte’s shiny and oversized box for the X48 motherboard is features the DQ6 logo on the front and some details on the back side. Its sure to get the attention of a potential buyer.

Inside the box we found some manuals, 4xSATA cables, IDE and FDD cables, 2x e-SATA kits, drivers CD, heatsink bracket for rear side of the motherboard installation, couple of Gigabyte badge sticker along with the I/O backplate shield.

Layout

Gigabyte used a dark green PCB for their motherboard and equips it with huge Copper heatsink on the NorthBridge chipset that extends into three heatpipes towards the MOSFETs heatsink and one heat-pipe to the SouthBridge. Gigabyte uses full solid capacitors all over the motherboard- especially around the CPU socket which allows maximum life span. Along with that, Gigabyte adds the Dynamic energy saver on board which lowers power consumption.

For memory expansion, you have four DDR3 DIMM sockets onboard that support of frequencies upto 1900MHz along with Intel X.M.P. support. The six SATA ports and the IDE connector sit just below the SouthBridge chip.

The Gigabyte X48T-DS6 has seven PCI Slots in total. The two light blue PCI-e are dual x16 while the black PCI-e are x1 and last two white ones are standards PCI slots. The back panel is very USB friendly- from the right, you have two legacy PS/2 ports ,Optical and Coaxial SPDIF outputs, four USBs with two IEEE1394 Fire wire connectors, four more USBs with two Ethernet and six audio jacks.

If you’re wondering about the controllers that Gigabyte uses for Audio and Network, you can see from the pictures above that Gigabyte uses two Realtek RTL8111c controllers for the two Gigabit network ports, while the Audio is taken care of via a Realtek ALC889A controller that supports eight channel output along with digital connectivity as seen on the backplate.

BIOS

Once we had motherboard powered up, we were greeted by the Gigabyte Q6 logo and we proceeded by pressing the “DEL” button to enter the BIOS. Most of the things here are ones found on almost all motherboards so we’ve skipped those, however, we here are some screenshots of the interesting parts of the BIOS starting with the PC health section where everything important is monitored as seen by the picture above.

Next, we checked out Gigabyte’s MB Intelligent Tweaker (M.I.T.) section, and maxed out all the settings for a Kodak moment so you can see what this board is capable of from the pictures above.