Gigabyte has put up its Extreme motherboards on its Website and there will be a DDR2 and DDR3 version for those interested in a high-end P45 motherboard with some interesting chipset cooling among its features. The DDR2 version will be known as the GA-EP45-EXTREME, while the DDR3 version goes under the name of GA-EP45T-EXTREME.

The Extreme boards use a large vertical heatsink, which is known as the Hybrid Silent-Pipe, into which a pair of heatpipes are connected. At the other end, these heatpipes attach to the P45 chipset heatsink and should boost the cooling performance of the chipset. The heatsink uses natural convection to draw cool air in from outside of the case.

Both motherboards also feature attachments for a watercooling kit to be easily attached to help cool the chipset and the Hybrid Silent-Pipe can be removed if this option is used. There's also a rather fancy heatpipe cooling setup to help cool the rest of the motherboard, as well as a small heatsink that protrudes out via the I/O shield which should help dissipate some heat out of the system.

The two boards feature Gigabyte's virtual 12-phase power regulation and two-phase power regulation for the memory and chipset. These boards also have hardware over Voltage control ICs, which Gigabyte claims will aid in overclocking these motherboards. Both boards also feature Gigabyte's DES power saving feature.

Other features include three x16 PCIe slots, although only two work in x8 mode with the third slot operating at x4 mode. There's also a single x1 PCIe slot and three PCI slots. Around the back you'll find two PS/2 ports, eight USB 2.0 ports, two Gigabit Ethernet connectors, a clear CMOS button and 7.1-channel audio with optical and coaxial S/PDIF out.

Add to this six onboard SATA ports, three FireWire headers, two headers for four additional USB 2.0 ports, a debug LED and power and reset buttons and it looks like these boards are pretty feature-packed.

According to Geizhals.at, both models will set you back around €230 and upwards, depending who you purchase them from, which is quite a lot of money for a motherboard, but not nearly as expensive as some of Asus' R.O.G. models.

You can find more details about the DDR2 version here and the DDR3 version here.