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| Gigabyte GA 965P DS3 Motherboard Review |
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With Core 2 Duo officially released, many people are faced with the question of what motherboard to buy. Most high end motherboards based on Intel's flagship 975X chipset cost upwards of £140. However, people who don't want to spend such a large amount on cash are not forgotten. There are a number of motherboards based on the 965P chipset which can be had for under £120. The main difference between the chipsets is mainly that the 965P chipset does not support crossfire. Apart from that, the only other significant difference is that most motherboards based on this chipset utilise the new ICH8 southbridge compared to the older ICH7 used on the majority of 975X boards.
Today, we'll be taking a look at the Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3. At about £100, it's one of the cheaper motherboards which natively support Intel's new line up of CPUs. However, don't be fooled by the price tag - this board really is a sheep in wolf's clothing.
Supplier: Fasktek UK
Manufacturer: Gigabyte
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First impressions
Upon inspection, the first thing you'll notice about the GA-965P-DS3 is that although it's a full size ATX board, it's somewhat smaller than most boards, measuring approximately 305 x 210 mm compared to the ATX standard of 305 x 244 mm. Another unique feature of this board is that it implements and all-solid capacitor design, which Gigabyte says improves stablity whilst overclocking. While we cannot be sure about these claims, we do know that solid capacitors are much more durable than electrolytic capacitors found on most other motherboards, and should extend the boards lifetime.
Click to enlarge
Let's have a closer look at the specifications of the DS3:
Processor
- LGA775 Intel CoreTM 2 Extreme/ Intel CoreTM 2 Duo processor*
- Supports 1066/800/533 MHz FSB
Chipset
- Northbridge: Intel® P965 Express Chipset
- Southbridge: Intel® ICH8
- Marvel 8053 Gigabit LAN Controller
- GIGABYTE SATAII controller
- Realtek ALC883 8 Channel Audio Codec
Memory
- Supports DDR2 800/667/533 memory
- Dual Channel architecture support up to 8GB by 4 DIMM slots
Expansion Slots
- 1 x PCI Express X16 slot
- 3 x PCI Express X1 slot
- 3 x PCI slots
Form Factor
- ATX form factor, 305 x 210mm
Internal I/O Connectors
- 1 x 24-pin ATX power
- 1 x 4-pin ATX 12V power connector
- 1 x floppy connector
- 1 x IDE connector
- 6 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors
- 1 x CPU fan connector
- 1 x system fan connector
- 1 x front panel connector
- 1 x front audio connector
- 1 x CD In connector
- 3 x USB 2.0/1.1 connectors for additional 6 ports by cables
- 1 x SPDIF In connector
- 1 x power LED connector
Rear Panel I/O
- 1 x PS/2 keyboard port
- 1 x PS/2 mouse port
- 1 x SPDIF Out connection (coaxial+optical)
- 1 x parallel port
- 4 x USB 2.0/1.1 ports
- 1 x serial port (COMA)
- 1 x RJ-45 port
- 6 x audio jacks (Line In / Line Out / MIC In/Surround Speaker Out (Rear Speaker Out)/Center/Subwoofer Speaker Out/Side Speaker Out)
H/W Monitoring
- System voltage detection
- CPU / System temperature detection
- CPU / System fan speed detection
- CPU warning temperature
- CPU / System fan failure warning
- CPU Smart Fan Control
Other Features
- Supports RAID 0, 1, 0+1, JBOD (GIGABYTE SATAII)
- Supports @BIOS
- Supports Download Center
- Supports Q-Flash
- Supports EasyTune 5
- Supports Xpress Install
- Supports Xpress Recovery2
- Supports Virtual DualBIOS