egyteam
07-28-2006, 10:59 AM
As Gigabyte's top of the line Intel P965 based motherboard, the GA-965P-DQ6 does not disappoint. Gigabyte has been making great pains to push the envelope for enthusiasts and hobbyists and the DQ6 shows the fruits of their labour. From sporting heatpipes (which most manufacturers are doing now, except DFI), to superb connectivity, and huge overclocking stability, the GA-965P-DQ6 appears to be a nearly ideal board for enthusiasts and for overclocking Conroe's. I suspect there is still room for improvement in its BIOS, particularly where it comes to memory write performance, and with further tweaks I'd like to see memory performance reach at least 75% theoretical bus throughput for at least reads... but only the future will tell how much memory performance can be increased on 965 based boards.
One thing that didn't work out so well for this board is the included metal backplate, or the "Crazy Cool". Honestly, while I initially thought the idea for the "Crazy Cool" was great, I ended up being very frustrated by it. I spent a bit of time trying to gently remove it, and came to the conclusion that it is not really meant to be removed - which is very dissapointing on such an excellent overclockers board as it prevented me from using high end air coolers such as the Noctua NH-U 12 and the ThermalRight Ultra 120.
As far as connectivity goes the DQ6 really is a top of the line board. I really liked the extensive SATA2 support; I would not hesitate to use this board as the basis of a server.
And as already mentioned, overclocking performance on this board is quite astonishing. We were able to reach a whopping 415MHz FSB (1660MHz) and I've never seen a Socket 775 based motherboard reach an FSB speed anywhere near what this board was able to achieve stably. Don't get me wrong, there is room for improvement, but I am blown away by the FSB speeds I was able to stably achieve. Whether or not the heatpipe design, 12 phase power and solid capacitors had anything to do with it, this is right now one of the kings of high FSB stability on the 775 platform.
Couple this with Gigabyte's apparent enthusiasm for improving the board through further BIOS updates, I'm very happy with the time spent with the DQ6 so far In fact, I was so impressed by the 1660MHz FSB that I am awarding the GA-965P-DQ6 our "Overclocker's Choice Award"!
http://neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/ga965p_dq6/
One thing that didn't work out so well for this board is the included metal backplate, or the "Crazy Cool". Honestly, while I initially thought the idea for the "Crazy Cool" was great, I ended up being very frustrated by it. I spent a bit of time trying to gently remove it, and came to the conclusion that it is not really meant to be removed - which is very dissapointing on such an excellent overclockers board as it prevented me from using high end air coolers such as the Noctua NH-U 12 and the ThermalRight Ultra 120.
As far as connectivity goes the DQ6 really is a top of the line board. I really liked the extensive SATA2 support; I would not hesitate to use this board as the basis of a server.
And as already mentioned, overclocking performance on this board is quite astonishing. We were able to reach a whopping 415MHz FSB (1660MHz) and I've never seen a Socket 775 based motherboard reach an FSB speed anywhere near what this board was able to achieve stably. Don't get me wrong, there is room for improvement, but I am blown away by the FSB speeds I was able to stably achieve. Whether or not the heatpipe design, 12 phase power and solid capacitors had anything to do with it, this is right now one of the kings of high FSB stability on the 775 platform.
Couple this with Gigabyte's apparent enthusiasm for improving the board through further BIOS updates, I'm very happy with the time spent with the DQ6 so far In fact, I was so impressed by the 1660MHz FSB that I am awarding the GA-965P-DQ6 our "Overclocker's Choice Award"!
http://neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/ga965p_dq6/