[acruxksa]

Gigabyte put these fancy name plates on top of the chipset cooler and it occurred to me that unless you have a cpu hsf unit that blows cool air down or sucks hot air up these plates are probably preventing the chipset cooler from working as well as it could. All the heatsinks on my DQ6 now look like the one on the right hand edge of the motherboard, which certainly can't hurt (except perhaps by voiding the warranty, but I did that long ago when I removed the crazy cool plate on the back to install a better hsf)

Below are a couple pictures of what I'm talking about.

Here is a stock GA-965P-DQ6 (early version, the chipset cooler may have changed in later versions)


Here is a picture of one of the plates I removed. They are very easy to remove and rather flimsy in their construction.


I have no way to really measure differences in cooling, but the logic seems sound. Removing the covers opens the chipset coolers up to better airflow. Which is probably more beneficial if your cpu hsf doesn't blow down on to the case like the stock cooler.