| Gigabyte GA 965P DS3 Motherboard Review |
| Written by Maxit | |||||
Page 2 of 3 A Closer lookThe northbridge and southbridge are passively cooled. Initially, we thought that these heatsinks were made of copper, but on closer inspection found out that they are made of aluminium and coloured gold. Also, If you look around the LGA 775 socket, you will notice that this board only has 3 phase power reulation. While it will be enough for Core 2 Duo and the existing line of power hungry netburst based CPUs, it's questionable whether it will be able to cope with quad-core "Kentsfield" CPUs which are scheduled for Q4. It's worth mentioning that the motherboard comes with solid capacitors, which are more stable, last longer and although cost more, are more reliable than standard capacitors.  The bundle included was absolutely no-frills. 4 SATA cables, 1 IDE cable, 1 floppy cable, users' guide booklet, a quick installation guide, a leaflet with detailed instructions on installing a CPU and finally a I/O backplate. Restricting the bundle to include only the bare necessities should help in keeping costs down.  The BIOSThe BIOS has a host of features to keep the overclocker happy. 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). Unfortunately, no matter how low you set the tRAS it never actually goes below 9, which is a shame. It's also worth mentioning that the RAM timings as well as a host of other BIOS options are hidden - you need to press Ctrl + F1 on the main BIOS page to make them accessible. The BIOS also has a wide range of voltage adjustments, however most of the default values are not listed which is strange. vCore can be adjusted form 0.5125v all the way upto 2.0v. This can be done in 0.00625v steps till 1.60v and then in 0.2 steps till 2.0v. Most of us will be staying well below 1.60v, so such fine adjustment of vCore is welcome. It allows you to overvolt your RAM by upto 0.6v in 0.1v steps. The default setting is not listed, but in reality we found this to be 1.8v. Therefore, in total you can pump 2.4v through your RAM. A slightly higher ceiling would be welcome though, especially for hardcore benchers. The FSB and MCH (northbridge) voltages can be increased independantly upto 0.3v above default settings in 0.1v increments. The PCI-e bus can be overvolted by 0.1v. Again, we hope that Gigabyte will list the default settings of all voltages, as well as fix the tRAS issue in a future BIOS release. |
