Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6

Disk Performance:

The USB 2.0 tests were done using an ATA133 160GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10 hard drive (model number: 6L160PO) enclosed in an Icy Box USB 2.0 hard drive caddy. We recorded the average read speed and average CPU usage using HD Tach's 8MB zone test.

USB 2.0 performance is better than the competition, but it seems to be at the expense of CPU usage. The Gigabyte board is at nearly 10% CPU usage for the increased transfer rates.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0

For our Photoshop Elements test, we used a selection of 400 3MP photographs taken in a variety of surroundings using the batch file processing function in the Elements Editor. We performed all of the auto fixes, including Auto Levels, Auto Contrast, Auto Colour and Sharpen before resizing the image to 640x480 and saving as a high quality JPEG.

The Gigabyte performs on par with the rest of the Intel Core 2 boards and merely a couple of seconds slower than the Asus P5B Deluxe.

File Compression & Encryption:

Our file compression and decompression tests were split into two halves to cover a broad spectrum of performance. The first test we ran was to compress and encrypt the MPEG-2 source file from our video encoding test with the highest quality compression ratio. Secondly, we compressed and encrypted the folder of 400 photographs used in our Photoshop Elements test with the same compression settings.

Again, performance is on a par with the other Intel Core 2-ready 975X and P965 boards.

File Decompression & Decryption:

The two RAR archives created during the compression and encyption tests were then decompressed and decrypted.

The Gigabyte board suffers slightly in small file decompression, dropping four seconds compared to the Asus P5B Deluxe board and equalling that of the Asus M2N32-SLI board with an Athlon 64 FX-62. In large file decompression, the GA-965P-DQ6 equals the performance delivered by the P5B Deluxe and is only a second behind the 975X boards.