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Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 Motherboard Review

Written by Maxit

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The BIOS

The BIOS is full of options which will keep even the most avid overclockers happy, although you are required to press ctrl+F1 on the main page in order to access some advanced overclocking features.

It allows adjustment of the FSB from 100 to 600 MHz in 1 MHz increments. RAM can be run at DDR2 533/667/709/800/888/1067 MHz. It has options enabling you to change common RAM timings such as CAS latency, RAS to CAS delay, RAS precharge and cycle time (tRAS).

You can adjust the vCore from a measly 0.6875v all the way to a suicidal 2.375v. This can be done in increments of 0.00625v from 0.6875v to 1.6v and then in 0.025 increments from 1.6v to 2.375v. RAm voltage can be adjusted from 1.8v to 2.575v in 0.025v steps. The PCI-e voltage and FSB voltage can both be independently overvolted from 0.05v to 0.35v in 0.05v increments. Similarly, The chipset voltage, referred to as vMCH, can be overvloted by upto 0.75v in 0.05v stages.

Overclocking

To see how the overclocking side of things went, we decided to push the board to its limits and find out just how good it really is.

Our testbed consisted of the following components:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 engineering sample cooled with Intel reference HSF
2 x 1 GB Team Xtreem PC2 5300 RAM
256 MB Connect 3D X1800XT
80 GB and 300 GB Maxtor Diamondmax 10 SATA hard drives
NEC ND 3500 AG DVD-RW drive
Antec TruePower 2.0 550W 12v EPS server PSU

Our E6300 has a default frequency of 1.86 GHz (266 x 7). Using the board, we managed to overclock the front side bus to an impresive 460 MHz, whist still utilising the default multiplier of 7. This resulted in an impressive 73% overclock on the CPU with its new clock speed of 3.22 GHz. This speed was cold bootable and 100% prime stable as well.

To achieve this overclock we had to bump up the vCore from the default setting of 1.2875 to 1.40 v, however vDroop caused it to drop to 1.344 v under full load. The vDroop isn't too bad, but it's nothing to write home about either.

It may have been possible to push the board further, but due to some peculiar reason, our sample board failed to POST with the multiplier set at 6x. Because of this, it's hard to say if the CPU hit a wall before the board did.

We were however, able to do a Super Pi 1M calculation at 495 x 7 at an impressive 3.47 GHz, an overclock of over 86% !!

Final Thoughts

The Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 is a feature rich board which overclocks well and looks very good. Build quality is top notch and the 12 phase power regulation is very impressive indeed. However the performance doesn't sparkle as much as we would have liked, especially when compared to the Gigabyte DS3 which costs £35 less and only lagged 10 MHz behind. If performance is high on the list you might want to look at our review of the Asus P5B Deluxe Wi Fi edition before making up your mind.

There is no doubt that the DQ6 is an excellent board which offers rock solid stability, decent layout and plenty of features. Unfortunately, this time round, it seems the competition, has outdone it.

Pros