You can place these probes anywhere you like inside your case, perhaps to monitor the temperature of the northbridge cooler and the power regulation hardware around your CPU. The downside is that you have to fix the temperature probes in place, perhaps with sticky tape or a dab of glue.

Gigabyte has two other versions of the GT with 680W and 550W ratings, as well as three Pro units - 800W, 680W and 550W - that don’t have the Power Tuner connection. Later in the year, there will be a 1200W Thor that has support for three graphics cards through six PCEe connectors.

The Power Tuner software has three modes: Main, Configuration and Alarm. We took a couple of screen grabs of the Main screen first with an HD 2600 XT graphics card and then with an HD 2900 XT.

Power Tuner screen with HD 2600 XT

Power Tuner screen with HD 2900 XT

The corruptions on the HD 2900 XT screen were clearly visible and rather annoying. We were using a Core 2 Extreme QX6800 on an Asus P5K3 Deluxe with 2GB of Kingston DDR 3 memory, so the reported power-draw figures of 110W and 189W to run Windows seem quite reasonable. When we pushed the HD 2900 XT system with a gaming benchmark, the Odin reported a maximum power draw of 328W which correlated quite well with a draw at the socket of 355W.