PCB Design and Functionality

Poorly designed mainboards with evident layout issues have become very rare these days. And this is definitely not about Gigabyte mainboards, which are designed by a team of outstanding engineers. Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P is also no exception to this rule – it uses classical components layout, has very thought-through design; even the smallest details indicate that the developers care about the user experience a lot.

A large “Ultra Durable” inscription on one of the heatsinks reminds us of a highest quality components used for the eight-phase processor voltage regulator as well as the rest of the PCB. All power connectors are in very convenient spots, there is enough room around the processor socket even for large cooling solutions, the four DIMM slots can accommodate up to 16GB of DDR3 SDRAM.

The heatsinks on chipset North Bridges often boast very unique shapes and sophisticated internal design. This time, they had to invent a very uniquely-shaped heatsink because it was close to the PCI Express slots.

The heatpipe connects it with the heatsink over processor voltage regulator transistors. Moreover, the processor voltage regulator circuitry is pretty complex, too.

Even a small heatsink over the AMD SB750 South Bridge doesn’t look common: