When the name Gigabyte is mentioned, most people will associate it with motherboards. I know I do. I was aware of the fact that they made other products like video cards but had no idea of the number of other products that they make for PC enthusiasts. When I received this heatsink I hit the Gigabyte website to see how they were marketing it, and I was amazed at the multitude of items they offer. Gigabyte is into computer cases, complete systems, optical drives, input devices, speakers, USB drives, and even full blown watercooling kits. One other item that they offer are heatsinks, and we will be looking at one of those today. The G-Power Lite is a mid-range budget heatsink, but budget doesn't always correlate to suckitude as I found out during testing.

Package

The G-Power comes in the usual hanging clamshell packaging that has pretty much become the standard for heatsink manufacturers. While I was glancing over the text on the front and back, this phrase caught my eye; "MOSFET Thermal Function". I started laughing when I saw that it means the fan blows the air through the fins, and then the air hits the motherboard. The marketing folks were reaching when they came up with that one. To my surprise, they use that same term on a few of their cooling products. Oh well, "MOSFET Thermal Function" probably sounds like a technical achievement to the uninformed. The package also shows that the G-Power is compatible with many different Intel and AMD motherboards.

Included with the heatsink are the retention mechanisms, some screws, a step-down resistor, a bracket for Intel 775 installations, and some thermal compound. There is also a well written instruction booklet that uses good pictures to take you step by step through the installation process. The most unusual thing about this heatsink is that it actually clips onto the plastic socket retention bracket. It had been so long since I did a review that required the retention bracket that I had to go out into the computer junkyard to find where I had tossed it. So many of today's aftermarket heatsinks screw directly into the backplate, so I had almost forgotten that there was a retention bracket that came with my testbench motherboard.

Here is another item that was a blast from the past, a fan adapter that has a resistor to drop the voltage going to the fan. Most manufacturers now include some type of rheostat if they want to give the end user the option to silence the fan instead of this resistor solution. I haven't seen one of these for years, I know I did a heatsink review that had one included a couple years back but I'll be darned if I can find it. Suffice it to say that not many manufacturers use this method to slow their fans down. That's not a bad thing, it's just unusual. The strange thing is that in operation at top speed, the fan is actually very quiet and probably wouldn't be noticeable at all inside of a case.

Inside the package, the heatsink had a piece of foam inserted between the base and the fins so that the heatpipes don't get bent during rough handling while in-transit.