Intel's Xeon Shows Its Stuff in 7 Motherboards

Gigabyte GA-9ITDW (E7525), Continued

The 6700PXH is being cooled by an active fan.

According to Intel, cooling the PCI-X bridge is no requirement. However, as this component is placed too close to the x16 PCIe slot, a huge heat sink would interfere with the graphics card, which ultimately forced Gigabyte to make use of a slim heat sink plus a little fan. We generally favor passive component cooling solutions as there are no mechanical parts that could get broken.

Apart from the two CPU fan headers, the Gigabyte does only have three additional connectors. Two of them are placed in order to deploy fans in the front part of a server case, the other one is for a rear-sided fan. While even desktop cases are ready for three or more fans today, more headers would be desirable. In addition to that, only the two CPU fan headers use the 4 pin design.

The voltage regulators are equipped with heat sinks.

Gigabyte uses classic SMD regulators.

Two 4 phase regulators supply the Xeon processors with the voltage needed. Their heat sinks will be ventilated by the air stream created by the CPU fans.