Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3

Craig Simms loves a good overclock in the morning. With eggs.

The moment we heard this thing was a righteous overclocker for its price, we added it to the review list – and fortunately it didn’t disappoint.

Although the target market is more mainstream – single PCI-E x16 slot, parallel and serial ports included – with only a little bit of fiddling we had our X6800 running at 3.63GHz stable – none too shabby, and only a little shy of our EVGA 680i 3.7GHz overclock. A warning here: the bottom of the board generates a lot of heat when overclocked, so hopefully your case is well ventilated.

Three PCI and three PCI-E x1 slots fill up the add-in board quota, although of course you’ll lose one PCI-E x1 if you insert a double-slot video card.

Vexingly, in the board’s only annoying layout problem you’ll also lose access to the clear CMOS jumper pins if you possess said dual-slot card. The IDE port located at the bottom of the board may also cause some issues in terms of cable routing and ease of access.

Solid capacitors are littered all over the board, outlining Gigabyte’s commitment to high quality parts. Two standalone passive sinks cool the chipsets.

Accessories are actually quite sparse, especially considering what is usually bundled in from Gigabyte, with only IDE/floppy/SATA cables and the requisite backing plate included.

The BIOS is well featured, although the advanced RAM timings are hidden away – you’ll have to press Ctrl+F1 at the main screen before going into Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker to do your overclocking thang. It’s not as nice as NVIDIA’s 680i BIOS, but then nothing is, save DFI’s efforts.

While the inbuilt BIOS flashing utility ‘Q-Flash’ is a good addition, its ability to only read from floppy drive is a severe oversight. We long for the day when we can flash from a USB stick from within the BIOS.

Sound is provided by the Realtek ALC883 chip, with optical and coax outputs included. Marvell supplies the gigabit Ethernet duties with its 88E8053 controller hitting the PCI-E bus.

Four USB ports sit at the back, with six more available if you have the hardware to hook up to the relevant headers. Six SATA, one IDE and one floppy cable are featured on the board for your storage whims. The two purple ports are powered by Gigabyte’s re-branded JMicron controller, and offer RAID 0, 1 and JBOD. The same controller also manages the IDE port, which might explain its odd placement. The rest are of course handled by ICH8, but unfortunately there is no RAID offered here as it is not the –R version of the southbridge.

Using an X6800, 2GB of Corsair PC2-6400 and our Albatron 7900GT we ran it through our usual benchmarks, and surprise, surprise, most things ended up the same as they’ve been with other Core 2 boards – but as mentioned above, this thing has overclocking legs of steel. Or silicon. Or something.

If you’re on a budget and you still want to go Core 2, you really can’t go wrong with this board. Paired with an E6400 you’ll probably get the single best value you can possibly get out of components today.

With a solid dedication to build quality and sublime performance, unless you need the extra PCI-E slot and features, then this is the board for you.

	EVGA nForce 680i SLI	Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3
Sandra Processor Arithmetic Dhrystone (MIPS)	27,100	27,053
Sandra Procssor Arithmetic Whetstone (MFLOPS)	18,593	18,456
Sandra Memory Bandwidth INT (MB/s)	5571	5547
Sandra Memory Bandwidth FLOAT (MB/s)	5637	5599
3DMark06	5259	5249