Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6

Gigabyte's DQ6 series has a new addition with the X38.

X38 has been a highly anticipated release and GIGABYTE has been one of the first to market with a product featuring this new northbridge. This isn’t any old product though; it’s the top of the line model with the DQ6 insignia.
After having an enjoyable experience with the P35 based DDR2 and DDR3 versions of the DQ6, it was time to see how things have changed with the new chipset – or if in fact there was even any noticeable change.

On the spec sheets, the GA-X38-DQ6 has much the same features as the GA-P35-DQ6 with the addition of some frills here and there. New features include support for upcoming 45nm processors on a 1600FSB (400MHz quad pumped), PCI-E 2.0 and a general increase in I/O ports, for example the available USB ports on the rear I/O panel now stand at a total of 10.

Another noticeable change is the increase in the power regulation around the socket, with the X38 version again upping the capacity with the ‘Quad-Triple’ phase power regulation, whilst continuing the complete use of solid state capacitors. This assures consistent and accurate power supply to your dual core and/or quad core processors thus minimising the amount of vdroop and vcore loss (drop).

The legend of Atomic’s Craig Simms lives on within this board, with one of his most voiced concerns of previous DQ6 models finally being addressed, and directly attributed to his pleas. This issue is the placement of a large portion of the SATA ports that, when utilising a dual card graphics solution, can potentially all be blocked by cards such as the HD2900XT. To correct this issue, GIGABYTE shifted these SATA connections down towards the bottom right of the motherboard.

On the flip side, something that hasn’t seen any attention is the placement of the CMOS clear jumper – it’s still a royal pain to get to.

For those of you that will go endeavouring on a journey into third party cooling on the northbridge will find the chipset now has an IHS just like a CPU does. This brings with it both positives and negatives. A positive being the heat dissipation from the northbridge core can be evenly dispersed to a greater surface area prior to being transferred into a cooler. The negative is that some current cooling systems, particularly those relying on a push-pin retention mechanism will find it difficult, perhaps even impossible in some cases, to properly secure the cooling solution.

To test this, we used a Noctua NC-U6 chipset cooler. Due to the slight increase in height from the IHS, as expected, the push pins were quite difficult to get firmly set in place. Amusingly, we weren’t worried about pressure as we didn’t have the fear of crushing the core now that it was under an IHS!

On to the testing, we jumped straight in with the CPU set to a 333MHz FSB and a multiplier of nine. To round things off, the memory was set on a 2:3 divider to run at DDR2-1000 with alpha timings of 4-4-4-10.

The system scored is what would be expected with a healthy 11.2k 3DMark06 result. This was interesting as one of the features that differentiate the X38 chipset from the P35 chipset is the introduction of the PCI-E 2.0 standard, however little gain was noticed. With that noted, we do expect the up coming NVIDIA G92/G90 cores to take full advantage of the increased bandwidth, as do we also expect a slight increase on the HD2900XT from AMD ATI.

Moving onwards to the real overclocking, we jumped straight to a 500MHz FSB as not only did we believe this to be the standard of any decent motherboard, but also that it shouldn’t be too much to ask of Intel and GIGABYTE’s new top dog.
The system booted happily at 500MHz with a multiplier of six. Paired with this was the memory set on a 1:1 divider, alpha timings of 4-4-4-10 and an end frequency of DDR2-1000.

The motherboard performed admirably and the increase in the front side bus returned notable gains across the board. In particular, gains were seen in Super Pi 4M and the bandwidth results from Everest read and Everest write benchmarks.

Pressing on with further voltage adjustments within the BIOS, we topped out at an impressive 566FSB with 560FSB being stable for benchmarking. Obviously the benchmarks saw a performance increase due to the higher CPU frequency; however the influence of the higher FSB is still present.

In the end, GIGABYTE has continued on from the strong impressions left by their P35 series and the X38 offers a strong and reliable basis for a solid enthusiast spec system.