Installation

Installing the Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6, like many motherboards, is only an issue if something is amiss, that being said, the GB installed without issue. Well, without issue except for the HS/Fan I use, which would not fit over the underside Copper HeatSink. I had to modify the mounting bracket some to get it working, and by “modify� I mean use a different mounting solution altogether :). As mentioned earlier, memory is inserted in either the yellow or red slots if you want to run them in Dual DDR2 mode. Making sure to connect the Samsung to SATA-II #1, let's boot her up.

BIOS

Gigabyte uses the Award BIOS, this is my first time playing around in a Gigabyte BIOS. Rumor has it they overclock well; we will soon see if that is the case. Let's look over the menus shall we?

Your intro screen into the BIOS is something most of us are familiar with, nothing out of the ordinary here for an Award BIOS based motherboard, well, maybe that selection lower left... First lets check out the other menu items on the left hand side :).

Another screen we are very familiar with, gives us our basic information/setup functions, we check, all is good, we move on.

Within the Advanced menu we can manipulate which hard drive we wish to boot, as well as which device we want looked at first. A catch on this page is C1E and CPU EIST. These are your next generation Intel SpeedStep technology enablers. If you have a desktop, turn these off unless you want to save power.

During my first boot for my Vista build, this one caught me, these two settings will catch a lot of us, “USB Keyboard Support� and USB Mouse Support�. By default, these are disabled. Shame Gigabyte, shame. This is also where you would setup your RAID solution (RAID 0, 0+1, 5 etc), if you chose to do so, as well as which mode your SATA controller is in (IDE/AHCI/RAID).

Power Management is just that; here is where you set what you want your devices to do when there is a power disruption, have not been used for awhile or simply wanting to turn your computer on by clicking the mouse (you mean people turn off their computers?).

PC Health is more informative then actually functional. Well, its supposed to be anyway. You can control your “Smart FAN� here, so if things are nice and cool the fan spins slower, and doesn't make as much noise. My disappointment is that the grayed out menus only show “OK� for their values. Well, its mighty nice that things are OK, but could you tell me how OK they are? Like giving me an actual value for say my 12V line or even VCore.

So here is where all the fun is. This is probably the first place most of you will go to after you make sure your drives are seen and the date is correct (Standard CMOS), hell, it was mine :). So let's go down the menu one by one and see what, if anything, we want to muck with here:

• Robust Graphics Booster – Supposedly this allows for greater graphics card bandwidth, you can select Auto, Fast or Turbo. I would recommend Auto.

• CPU Clock Ratio – This is a newer setting in the 975x and 965 chipsets, this allows you to set your multiplier to a level LOWER then the stock value, to 6. So if you have a 10x multiplier, then you can clock down to a 6x multiplier (why you ask? To get a greater FSB score of course :p).

• CPU Host Clock Control – This allows you to set your FSB, disabled uses the inherent clock of the chip, enabled allows you to manually choose that speed.

• CPU Host Frequency – Here we go, this is where we set the FSB, we have a range of 100 to 700 (QDR). If you are running a brand new C2D, it would be set by default to 266 (1066 MHz FSB CPU)

• PCI Express Frequency – Pretty obvious, leave this set to Auto or 100MHz, no need to add this into the mix of what could go wrong at overclock.

• C.I.A.2 – This is an automated overclocking utility built into the BIOS by Gigabyte United. There are 6 levels of OC available from 5% all the way to 19% (ok, not all the way but up to). Yes, it is a conservative OC in the world of C2D processors.

• System Memory Multiplier – The adjustable range here is dependent on the value chosen for the CPU FSB. The default selection of Auto will choose the memory speed for you. There are also choices of 2.0 (2:1 FSB), 3.0 (3:1 FSB), 2.5, 2.66, 3.33 and 4+ (not entirely sure about the +).

• Memory Frequency – A subset of the above menu, this is for display purposes only. The information displayed is 2 values, the first of which is the “normal valueâ€� and the second is the adjusted value determined by the CPU Host Frequency selection.

• High Speed DRAM DLL – This is not very well explained, nor was I able to truly test its functionality. It says in the Manual that these are “Special DDR DLL settings for running above 1000MHzâ€� select DLL Option 1, if your overclock fails, try Option 2. Why thank you for that mass of insight, now can I get a freaking clue as to what these are doing?

• System Voltage Core – This is either Manual or Auto, and Auto does a pretty decent job at setting the needed values to overclock, now if I could just see what those values actually were, that would be sweet.

• DDR2 Over Voltage – This allows you to set the VDDR2 to a value above normal, whatever normal is. Range is +0.025 to +0.775).

• PCIe Over Voltage – Increase PCIe voltage from +0.05 to +0.35 above normal.

• (G)MCH Over Voltage – Increase GMCH voltage from +0.05 to +0.75 above normal.

• FSB Over Voltage – Increase FSB voltage from +0.05 to +0.35 above normal.

• CPU Voltage Control – Now we get to control the actual voltage again. The values available are dependent on your CPU, mine was from 0.678750VCore to 2.37500VCore (Way above what I would call a safe VCore for a C2D).

• Normal CPU VCore – The normal; value of your chip, in my case, 1.32V.

Lastly I will cover Dual BIOS/Q-Flash, which is a BIOS utility to allow you to flash your BIOS from within your BIOS, confused yet? Basically this allows you to boot into another small OS just for flashing the BIOS, alleviating the requirement to be in Windows (for the Windows impaired users, aka Linux) or without having to have a floppy/USB Flash Drive boot up DOS for you. This works fairly well once you have upgraded to BIOS rev 1.09 or higher, as you can use a USB Flash disk formatted in FAT32 with your BIOS code on it.

Previous versions apparently required a floppy disk or FAT32 Hard Drive?

Quick Notes / Observations

Driver Installation was, well, almost non-existent. This is Vista and most of the drivers are packaged with the OS. Nevertheless I went out to the Gigabyte website and downloaded the latest Vista drivers, as even though Vista is new, the drivers are at best from the September 06 time frame. The updates went in without an issue, oh and yes, still a reboot required. For those of you wanting to use the Driver DVD Gigabyte included, here is what that looks like.

You can also flash your BIOS from within Windows using Gigabytes @BIOS, surprisingly it works with Vista as well. Gigabyte did a nice job getting their interface to work with Vista so quickly, however, using the web update feature, it wanted to downgrade my BIOS to F6 (I am running F9). Some of the quirks with the utility is that when you check for a new version of @BIOS it promptly reports there are no new versions, you click ok, and it has shutdown the program on you.

Test System: Gigabyte 965P-DQ6, 2GB SuperTalent PC2-8000, Intel E6400 Core 2 Duo, HIS X1600Pro, Samsung 250GB, 8MB buffer, 7200 RPM, SATA-II Drive, Windows Vista Home Premium

Comparison System: I am comparing the DQ6 to the previously reviewed Asus P5W DH Deluxe Motherboard.

Testing

Time for the testing phase, all tests are run 3 times and results are then averaged (unless otherwise noted). VL’s testing suite includes the following:

SiSoft Sandra 2007 - Our standard synthetic benchmark suite, updated to version 2005. While it doesn't provide real-world information, it does give us a base for the rest of the tests.

PiFast - A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is PiFast version 4.3, by Xavier Gourdon. We used a computation of 10000000 digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory. Note that lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.

DVD Shrink 3.2 - We ripped the War of the Worlds bonus feature off the disk at 100% and compressed the file from the hard drive to 70%. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

TMPGEnc 4.0 - We used an Animatrix file, titled The Second Renaissance Part 1, and a WAV created from VirtualDub. The movie was then converted it into a DVD compliant MPEG-2 file with a bitrate of 5000. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

SiSoft Physical Drive Benchmark – Similar to SiSoft CPU and Memory testing in that it does not necessarily give us real world indication of performance however it does allow for baseline testing.

Quake 4 – How good is the CPU / Video / Memory communication? We strip down a demo of Q4 to 640x480 HQ and make the processor do a lot more work then it normally has to.

Subsytem Testing – We test the on-board sound performance using RightMark3D and the on-board NIC(s) using DUMeter.

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