Review: Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 Intel P965 mainboard

by Tarinder Sandhu on 24 July 2006, 08:23

Tags: Gigabyte (TPE:2376)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qagcz

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System setup, notes, and overclocking

System setup

Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 SLI System Intel i975X Bad Axe ATI Sturgeon System
Processor Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme X6800 (2.93GHz, 4MiB L2 cache, LGA775) AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 (2.8GHz, 2MiB L2 cache, AM2)
Motherboard Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 - Intel P965 Intel D975XBX - Bad Axe - i975X ATI Sturgeon Reference - (Xpress 3200 CrossFire)
Memory 2GiB (2 x 1024) Corsair XMS2 PC8500 EPP
Memory timings 4-4-4-12-2T @ 800MHz
Graphics card(s) Sapphire Radeon X1900 XTX 512MiB
Disk drive(s) Seagate 160GB 7200.9 SATA 3Gbps
BIOS revision D23 (15/06/06) 1304 (20/06/06) 08.00.13
Mainboard software Intel Inf Update 8.00.1009 SATA(AHCI): 2.5.1540.25
IDE: 1.00.0000.3
CHIPSET: 5.10.1000.5
Graphics driver ATI Catalyst 6.6 BETA
Operating System Windows XP Pro SP2 32-bit

CPU speed

Testing software

We ran the Gigabyte GA-965-DQ6 through the usual barrage of tests:

  • ScienceMark Memory Bandwidth
  • ScienceMark Memory Latency
  • Pifast calculation to 10M places
  • KribiBench
  • HEXUS WAV encoding
  • HEXUS DivX encoding
  • Cinebench 2003
  • HDTach 3.0.1.0

For 3D performance it was the intrepid trio of HEXUS custom benchmarks:

  • Far Cry v1.33
  • Quake 4 v1.04
  • Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.05
We're pitting Gigabyte's GA-965P-DQ6 against Intel's D975XBX Bad Axe motherboard, and both feature Intel's Core 2 Duo Extreme X6800 CPU. We've also added performance numbers from an AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 setup which is centred around ATI's Xpress 3200 chipset. Other than a difference in CPU and chipset, all other components are the same.

Gigabyte's tried to increase benchmark scores the old-fashioned way, that is, by inflating the FSB the board and CPU run at.



Intel, as you would expect, keeps the CPU speed right on the money, which translates to an operating speed of 2933.33MHz. Please bear this slight speed increase in mind when comparing benchmarks. AMD's Athlon 64 FX-62 AM2 is run at 2802.15MHz on the reference Sturgeon board.

We've not included any details on the accompanying packaging. We received the bare board and will update this review with the associated bundle once it is confirmed.

Overclocking



By increasing all voltage rails and touch and knocking down the multiplier on the unlocked Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPU to 6x, we were able to inch up the board's FSB to ~350MHz. This stable speed was acheived with standard air cooling.

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