Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6

Richard's Thoughts:

Without a doubt, I really like this board. It's not quite an infatuation, though, because a few things still irritate me. The lack of extra USB 2.0 and Firewire PCI brackets in the box is a concern to me, and I don't like the fact that they were lost at the expense of Gigabyte choosing to include four eSATA cables. I would have expected both, in all honesty.

You also still have to press CTRL+F1 in order to show the memory timing options in the BIOS, in typical Gigabyte fashion. I think this is totally unnecessary, and the fact that there is no way to make memory timings available permenantly means that it becomes a chore if you're trying to squeeze every last drop out of the board.

Gigabyte included one more cool feature not yet mentioned -if the board fails to POST with your chosen BIOS settings, it will keep trying to restart itself using values incrementally smaller until it can POST. We were having some warm reboot issues because of this with the F4 BIOS; however, the newest F5 version seems to alleviate this. Though it's very useful, we still see one issue with this feature - it could potentially hurt your hard drives in the long run, as they are constantly turning on and off when the board fails to POST successfully due to a bad choice of settings.

The board also looks pretty decent, although the Asus P5B Deluxe with its black PCB admittedly looks better from an aesthetic point of view. But what I've really come to love about it is the layout - everything on the Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 is incredibly well-positioned. In fact, the only issue we found was that the memory slots were slightly too close to the primary PCI-Express x16 slot, making it impossible to remove memory when a high-end video card is installed. In our eyes, that's hardly a show-stopping layout issue that is going to steer you away from it. The board also has no non-feature features, meaning that everything you see on the board is realistically usable in every day usage scenarios.

The fact that I have very little left to say here without really repeating myself should speak volumes about my opinion of this board. I can go on for a while in a pedantic manner, talking about what I would change, but there's only so many ways you can say you just like something. I would definately recommend this board to others looking at diving into the world of Core 2 - such that I'm considering buying one myself!

Tim's Thoughts:

My time with this board has been as trouble-free as Richard's experience, so there isn't much point in repeating what he's already said about the board. However, there are some areas that warrant some further discussion before I talk about how well the GA-965P-DQ6 fared in our overclocking and stability testing.

The way that this board just worked out of the box is something that many manufacturers fail to do in this day and age, so credit to Gigabyte on that front. I know it's something you expect when spending £100+ on a new hardware component, but sometimes that simply doesn't happen. I know how frustrating it can be when a board just fails to work properly out of the box and it's a wonder how these boards make it past the Q.A. process.

Richard mentioned the CTRL+F1 annoyance in passing and I can tell you that after using the BIOS for prolonged periods of time when overclocking the board, it really started to get on my nerves. I'd keep asking myself 'where are the memory timings?' and then quickly remind myself that I hadn't enabled the 'advanced' tweak options.

Although they are not directly referred to as advanced tweak options, it certainly seems that way because they're hidden out of sight. However, what makes the thing even more strange is the fact that novice users that are protected from the advanced tweak options are able to push 2.375V through their CPU - a voltage that will no doubt promptly send the poor CPU to the silicon gods.

Apart from that, though, there's very little wrong with the board.

Overclocking: First, I overclocked the GA-965P-DQ6 using a Core 2 Duo E6400 to see if I could replicate a similar experience to what I had with the Asus P5B Deluxe WiFi AP Edition. Using the default multiplier, vCore set to 1.5V, MCH voltage set to +0.4V and FSB voltage set to +0.2V, I went in search of the highest-stable overclock the board was capable of using Noctua's NH-U12 oversized heatsink and a low-noise 120mm Coolink fan.

With no additional cooling on the board, I managed to get the CPU stable using two instances of Prime 95 at 3472MHz (434x8) using the F4 BIOS. After updating the board to the latest F5 BIOS revision, our maximum stable CPU overclock increased to 3520MHz (440x8) - not too shabby. Right after a CMOS reset, I was able to set the frequency back up to 440MHz and the board managed to successfully POST. This is something that many boards - including the Asus P5B Deluxe - are not capable of, as they require some coaxing in order to reach their maximum bus overclock.

Still using the F5 BIOS, I went back and installed a Core 2 Extreme X6800, forcing the CPU multiplier to 6.0x in order to find the maximum attainable front side bus. We were able to get the board stable right up to 480MHz FSB. It's not bad, but I've seen over 500MHz FSB using the same chip and multiplier on the Asus P5B Deluxe with the latest BIOS revision. However, it took much more work to get the P5B Deluxe stable at these high frequencies.

This is only thing that seals it over the Asus P5B Deluxe, for me: the board overclocks with incredible ease. You just can't argue with getting nearly up near the 500MHz FSB mark with very little effort and some small voltage increases. With a decent cooling setup and a chip that is really willing to show its true colours, I have no doubts that you'll be able to get this board to even higher frequencies than we've seen here.

Stability: We subjected the board to bit-tech's stress test with both BIOS revisions. If you're not familiar with our procedures, we subject the board to two instances of Prime 95 to stress CPU and memory, an instance of IOMeter to stress the board's I/O capabilities and a continuously looped Far Cry timedemo running in the foreground at 1600x1200 4xAA 8xAF.

With the F4 BIOS we were using a Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPU. I returned to the board after nearly 30 hours of stress testing to find that the board was still running and hadn't dropped a beat. Our timedemo was still running at the same frame rates it was at he start of the test and both Prime 95 and IOMeter were error free.

After updating to the F5 BIOS, we ran the same stress test again with a Core 2 Duo E6400 chip installed, running at that chips' maximum stable overclock of 3520MHz (440x8). I returned to the board after 28 hours and there was no sign of the board faltering under load, even with an incredibly high overclock. This is as stable, if not even more stable than any other Gigabyte board we've used. It was able to parry all of the punches we threw in its direction.

Both stress tests were completed with no additional cooling on the board. The PWM heatsinks in particular got incredibly warm to the touch, especially when we had run our stress test with the board running well outside of its specified limits. That is not necessarily a good thing, and as always we do recommend good airflow across any passively-cooled motherboard. On the other hand, the fact that the board could withstand such high temperatures under extreme load it is a testament to how stable this motherboard actually is.

Final Thoughts...

If you are looking for the best Core 2 motherboard out there at this moment in time, you need look no further than Gigabyte's GA-965P-DQ6. It is fair to say that the board isn't quite perfect and there is certainly room for improvement in some minor areas. However, Gigabyte has mostly delivered on the features front and it has certainly delivered on the engineering front.

Our experience with the board has been flawless and we've been incredibly impressed by what Gigabyte has achieved. To put it succinctly, there isn't a better P965 motherboard on the market, and the fact that it will support Intel's Core 2 Quad processors is just the icing on the cake. Awesome.