The Gigabyte GA-890FXA-UD7 motherboard comes with this
water block attached. It can be left in place and if you already have a watercooling circuit connected in that
way. No tubing is supplied, just the custom waterblock for the AMD 890FX
northbridge. If you don't use watercooling Gigabyte supply a nice passive heatsink
to put in its place.
Vents out the back of the passive Silent-Pipe allow hot
air to exit through this passive heatsink. Since the chipsets and CPU VRM are
all connected by heatpipe, this can help drop internal case temperatures by
exhausting motherboard component heat waste outside of the computer case.
Clearance is good around the CPU socket area. The
GA-890FXA-UD7 shouldn't have any problems with large heatsinks from Noctua!
The 8+2 phase power supply for the CPU
is cooled by a nice passive heatpipe connected heatsink. The low profile
aluminum heatsink works from air blowing off the main CPU heatsink. The
GA-890FXA-UD7 is compatible with 45nm socket AM3 processors of up to 140W TDP, and backwards compatible with a
range of Phenom II and Athlon II chips. Support for
dual-core, triple-core, quad-core and six-core is a given.