| Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 Motherboard Review |
| Written by Maxit | |||||
 Price: £139.95 inc vat Supplier: Fastek UK Manufacturer: Gigabyte First Impressions {jgxtimg src:=[images/stories/reviews/gigabyte/gigabyte-dq6-mb9-big.jpg] width:=[550]} This is certainly the most colourful board I've ever had the pleasure to review. A superb looking heatpipe cooling system caters for the Northbridge, ICH8 Southbridge, and the VRMs. The box is neither longer nor wider than your average motherboard box, however it is comparatively deeper and heavier than the average motherboard bundle. This is because it's splendidly packed with separate compartments for the motherboard and its accessories.   Like some other high end 965P based motherboards, the DQ6 also features dual PCI-e slots. Without support for crossfire, the only reason you'd want to use both slots would be for a setup with more than 2 monitors. Even though it's possible to run 2 nVidia cards in SLi on the 975X and 965P chipsets using hacked drivers, you would notice a significant performance hit on a 965P board such as the DQ6 compared to a 975X board. This is because unlike 975X boards, the secondary PCI-e slot only has 4 lanes compared to 8 lanes, also found on AMD motherboards that officially support SLi. This can lead to a 25% drop in performance in SLi mode compared to boards which can use 8 lanes in the secondary slot. Here are the detailed technical specifications of the GA-965P-DQ6: Processor
Chipset
Memory
Expansion Slots
Form Factor
Internal I/O Connectors
Rear Panel I/O
Unique Features
A Closer LookHeatpipes are now the de-facto standard used by motherboard manufacturers to cool critical hot-spots on their boards, and the story is no different in the case of the DQ6. The heatpipe system Gigabyte have come up with really looks promising and really stands out. The system consisting of aluminium sinks and a heatpipe cools the Northbridge, Southbridge and voltage regulators. By the look of the design, it appears that the passively cooled setup depends on airflow from a heatsink to ensure optimum performance. Unfortunately unlike Asus, Gigabyte didn't include an optional fan to use for those of us who are lucky enough to use water, or even phase change cooling. There is another side to the story however - the sinks that cool the VRMs are quite close to the socket, which could prevent the use of some larger heatsinks. What really impresses is the 12 phase voltage regulation found on this board. This is an industry first, and we commend Gigabyte for including it on the DQ6, as this should ensure outstanding stability when overclocking.  The bundle isn't anything to write home about, mainly consisting of manuals driver CDs and various cables. It is very well presented though. 
Also included are some molex to SATA power converters as well as PCI brackets with USB and firewire ports. The latter is greatly welcomed as it's not long before you run out of USB ports.  The BIOSThe 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. OverclockingTo 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:
 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 ThoughtsThe 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
Cons
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