Raves got me Started

"Conroe", "Allendale", "Core 2 Duo", "965P", "ICH8"... these are probably part of the vocabulary you snip off dialogues between your neighbourhood geeks. It just seems that just about everyone is mad about a Core 2 Duo. With that lust, it brings forth the search for a good motherboard which is an inevitable upgrade chore with the two main criteria being, Good and reasonably priced. I have to admit that I did not pay much attention to the Gigabyte GA 965P-DS3 at first, being more drawn to it's "bigger brothers", the GA 965P DS4 and DQ6. However, reading through many forums, it seems that the DS3 was getting very good feedback from users and this got my curiousity perked so I decided to find out for myself...

First let us take a look at the specs of this motherboard:

Specification

Processor LGA775 Intel Core™ 2 Extreme/ Intel Core™ 2 Duo processor* Supports 1066/800/533 MHz FSB Chipset Northbridge: Intel® P965 Express Chipset Southbridge: Intel® ICH8 Marvel 8053 Gigabit LAN Controller GIGABYTE SATAII controller Realtek ALC883 8 Channel Audio Codec Memory Supports DDR2 800/667/533 memory Dual Channel architecture support up to 8GB by 4 DIMM slots Expansion Slots 1 x PCI Express X16 slot 3 x PCI Express X1 slot 3 x PCI slots Form Factor ATX form factor, 305 x 210mm Internal I/O Connectors 1 x 24-pin ATX power 1 x 4-pin ATX 12V power connector 1 x floppy connector 1 x IDE connector 6 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors 1 x CPU fan connector 1 x system fan connector 1 x front panel connector 1 x front audio connector 1 x CD In connector 3 x USB 2.0/1.1 connectors for additional 6 ports by cables 1 x SPDIF In connector 1 x power LED connector Rear Panel I/O 1 x PS/2 keyboard port 1 x PS/2 mouse port 1 x SPDIF Out connection (coaxial+optical) 1 x parallel port 4 x USB 2.0/1.1 ports 1 x serial port (COMA) 1 x RJ-45 port 6 x audio jacks (Line In / Line Out / MIC In/Surround Speaker Out (Rear Speaker Out)/Center/Subwoofer Speaker Out/Side Speaker Out) H/W Monitoring System voltage detection CPU / System temperature detection CPU / System fan speed detection CPU warning temperature CPU / System fan failure warning CPU Smart Fan Control Other Features Supports RAID 0, 1, JBOD (GIGABYTE SATA 2) Supports @BIOS Supports Download Center Supports Q-Flash Supports EasyTune 5 Supports Xpress Install Supports Xpress Recovery2 Supports Vertual DualBIOS

Expansion Slots & Capacitors

 

A big green sticker shouts out Gigabyte's effort in providing good power and stability for this motherboard:

All Capacitors onboard are Conductive Polymer Aluminum Solid Capacitors

 

The x16 PCIE slot for your graphics card:

The PCIE x16 slot is situated between 3 PCIE 1x slot, 1 above it and 2 below it. And thereafter, you've got 3 PCI expansion slots. You also see that the BIOS battery is situated right below the PCIE x16 slot and the CMOS reset switch is right on top of the battery, with which you short out with a screwdriver should you wish to reset the CMOS settings to it's default. Beside the BIOS battery is the ICS clock generator.

The ICH8 Southbridge is located at the bottom right of the PCIE slot, with a small heatsink over it. It does get rather warm during operation but definitely holds fine with just a passive heatsink.

6 SATA connectors lie right below and beside the Southbridge. You also have the IDE connector in the same area.

 

The Realtek ALC883 8 Channel HD Audio Codec, not WLP 3.0 Compliant.

Marvel 8053 PCI-Express Gigabit LAN Controller

 

Over at the rear I/O panel, you have your PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, a SPDIF Out connection (coaxial+optical), a parallel port, 4 x USB 2.0/1.1 ports, a serial port, a RJ-45 port and 6 x audio jacks (Line In / Line Out / MIC In/Surround Speaker Out (Rear Speaker Out)/Center/Subwoofer Speaker Out/Side Speaker Out).
 

Power Regulation and Board Bundle

This motherboard runs modestly off a 3 phase power regulation. Instead of the 8-pin +12v EPS, this motherboard takes a 4-pin +12v.

CPU Core Voltage is regulated by Intersil 6312 VRM 11 voltage regulator

The CPU Fan header located right above the 4 DIMM slots

This is what the motherboard bundle holds:

An I/O shield, an IDE cable, a floppy cable, 4 SATA cables

 

The motherboard manual, and hardware installation Guidebook and the Driver/Utility CD

BIOS: Clock Frequencies

Venturing into the BIOS, you may at first find it rather bare.

 

Under the Advanced BIOS features, you find some control over the CPU features supported by your CPU. In this case you see the features supported by the Intel Core 2 Duo I was running the board on. During overclocking, I disabled No-Execute Memory Protect, C1E, TM2 and Virtualization Technology. Virtualization Technology is not yet supported in your applications so I saw no point enabling it.

 

Under PC Health status, you get a status check on your Vcore, Memory voltage, the +3.3v and +12v lines and of course your CPU and system temperature. I disabled the fan speed control during overclocking to run the fan at full speed.

 

As with many Gigabyte motherboards out there, there is a control function wthin the BIOS to enable Power-User options. Simply press CTRL F1 at the main menu to enable extra options. This is what you get in MIT when you press F1 at the main menu to enable Power-User Mode.

You get quite a bit more tweaking options with this, very significantly a whole tray of Memory settings, particularly various latency timings.

 

The Clock Frequencies controllable within the BIOS include the CPU Host Frequency, AKA Front Side Bus Speed and the PCIE Bus Speed. CPU Host Frequency is selectable up to 600MHz, in 1MHz increment, but whether the board runs it is another question. PCIE Bus speed is selectable up to 150MHz.

BIOS: Voltages Offered

CIA2 is an automatic overclocking feature based on artificial intelligence. From Cruise to Full Thrust settings, you can determine how aggressive you want the automatic overclocking to take place. Still, for most power-users, manual control over clock speeds is still advised. That was why I left it disabled when do overclocking manually.

System Memory clock speed can be adjusted in proportions of the CPU FSB, from 2.00 Multiplier that runs the Memory Synch with FSB, to 4.0+ Multiplier that runs your Memory up to twice the speed of the FSB.

Memory Performance Enhance Option can be adjusted to boost Memory Bandwidth performance. We did some tests and will share with you the gain you get at the various settings later on in this article

Finally, we come to the Voltage Options offered on the Motherboard. If you're going to be running default clock speed for every component, you'll probably not be needing to mess around with these options. But hey, most of you readers are probably planning to do some overclocking, be it mild or heavy-duty. So voltage options are crucial factors when you survey for the right board. Fortunately, this board does not disappoint in this department.

PCIE Voltage is offered a mild boost upwards, Memory voltage is selectable up tp 2.4v with the +0.6v option, FSB voltage can be tuned up by +0.3v, MCH Voltage also goes up to +0.3v (Default at 1.2v) and this gives the 965P chipset onboard more voltage which comes in handy when pushing the Front-side Bus Speed and Memory settings. CPU Voltage is given ample of lee-way offering up to 2.0v, although the climb in voltage gets jumpy towards the end, 1.6v jumps to 1.8v and then to 2.0v. Form my testings, the VMCH does nicely at +0.2v without getting the chipset heatsink overly hot while offering good overclocking capability. And most people won't be needing CPU voltage much above 1.5v.

Test Compare: 3D Mark, PC Mark, SuperPi

We compared the performance of this motherboard against a premium motherboard based on a higher-end chipset, the Intel D975XBX Motherboard on the i975x Chipset. The D975XBX costs almost twice as much as the DS3, so it isn't exactly an apple to apple comparison but our main aim is to see how much performance you are trading off for the cash you save.

Platform Test Setup
CPU	Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 2.66GHz
Motherboard	Gigabyte GA965P DS3	Intel D975XBX
Memory	2 x 1GB Corsair 8500C5 DDR2 Memory set at CL4-4-4-5 DDR2 800
Graphics Card	PowerColor ATi X1900GT 256MB
Power Supply	Silverstone Zeus ST75ZF
Optical Storage	ASUS 16x DVD Rom
Hard Disk	Seagate 80GB Barracuda SATA
Operating System	Windows XP Professional SP2

3D Mark 06 is primarily aimed at measuring a system's graphics performance and is largely bound by the graphics card especially in single card configurations.

Even so, there was quite a significant difference between the D975XBX and the Gigabyte DS3. This is rather peculiar and it seems that the 975 board is doing something well in churning out 3D frames, or that the Gigabyte is doing something amiss in this area. We shall see if this graphics advantage of the D975XBX can be seen in later tests.

PC Mark 05 shows the 2 boards performing much closer. If you look at the individual test results however, you will see that the Gigabyte DS3 actually performs a little better in CPU and Memory performance but displays the same slight handicap in Graphics we saw in 3D Mark. With the same graphics card being used on both platforms, I did a double check to ensure that both boards are running at PCIE x16 link, and are using the same graphics drivers and image settings.

Like what was shown with PC Mark, the Gigabyte does seem to perform slightly better when it comes to non-3D applications. I ran SuperPi 16M tests on both boards to test out the processing/calculation performance and the Gigabyte DS3 finishes a slight 3 seconds faster in this test lasting a bit more than 9 minutes.

Gaming & Multimedia Tasking

Performance in 3D games is a must-test as this is one area which will see heavy usage. In order to prevent the graphics card from holding back the entire system, so much so that we cannot differentiate the faster board from the slower board, I ran the games at a 800x600 resolution with High Quality settings.

I am really not surprised to see the DS3 trail behind by a slight 3-4fps in most games. This is a double reinforcement of our finding that the D975XBX does better in Graphics performance. Once again ladies and gentlemen, I remind you that the D975XBX is close to twice the price of the DS3 so form your own judgement on this.

So what shall we test next? What other applications will most users be running this motherboard on? Yes, Multimedia tasking such as converting an MP3 file and rendering an edited home video. So we ran an Audio MP3 Conversion test with iTunes and a video rendering test with Power Director.

Results show that both boards are neck to neck in Audio Conversion and the DS3 scoops up the Video test a little snappier than the D975XBX.

Tweaking & Overclocking

As we were saying a bit earlier when exploring the BIOS, users can actually tune up Memory performance by switching Memory Performance Enhance from Normal to Fast and Turbo. So what kind of gain is there?

Above you see a Sisoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth benchmark comparision between the Normal Setting and Fast Setting. Only about a 2% boost, but this for some die-hard tweakers is icing on the cake. Free performance increase is always welcome, no matter how small. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the system to boot into the OS stably at the Turbo Settings so no result on that to share.

In terms of overclocking the Front Side Bus speed- a vital determiner when you have a low multiplier processor such as an Intel Core 2 Duo E6300- this board delivers without requiring too much work or experimentations. As incredible as it seems for a group of geeks used to "300+MHz FSB clocks", 471MHz FSB was achieved on this board without much of a sweat. It was done with an E6300, and was stable enough to run benchmarks. I would have been damn pleased with such an overclock by itself, but researching around reading through user experiences such as this and this made me feel kind of inadequate. Ah well, one needs to be contented at some point!

So we see that the DS3 is no softie when it comes to pushing the FSB clocks. But how about the CPU overall clock speed then? How does this board do? I took the Core 2 Duo E6700 @ 2.66GHz and pushed it to 3.87GHz stable with a simple watercooling setup on the CPU, to make sure heat is not holding any component back.

What do you think? What I think is that while this board does great when you want FSB and just plan on doing reasonable 3.5GHz air-cooling overclocks on the E6300, E6400 Allendales; this is probably not the board for pushing the CPU clock speeds to close in on 4GHz for Core 2 Duos, especially when you're on the 4MB Cache Conroes of E6600, E6700, X6800. The modest 3 phase power seems to be the limiting factor in this area. For such extravagant plans it's probably a safer bet to hit on it's 6 phase or 12 phase powered "elder brothers" of DS4 and DQ6.

Pencil Voltage Mods: VMCH, VDimm, VDroop

Want to improve overclocking? Well here are some instructions on simple voltage mods you can perform on this board to push it even further. Take Note that such mods will void your warranty immediately! And that risk is involved!

Some pictures here Courtesy of Kunaak from XtremeSystems.

For almost no voltage droop between idle and load conditions, a CPU voltage droop mod can be performed.

Directly short out the resistor circled above, with a conductive pen or a tiny blob of solder. Before the mod, I would get about about a 0.05v droop under load, but after the mod, the CPU voltage remained stable throughout.

 

My friend Kunaak has figured out some useful voltage mods for this board so here are some information die-hard overclockers will appreciate.

First off, you can modify the VMCH voltage, that is the Northbridge voltage for the 965P chipset. This may help you out in achieving higher FSBs. Be sure to cool the chipset well though, with at least a fan over the Northbridge heatsink.

Above, you see where to measure current VMCH with your multimeter, which is right below the PCIE x16 slot.

 

Now under default voltage, VMCH should read about 1.2v. You can solder a 20K ohms Variable Resistor from the leg of the chip arrowed above and connect the other leg of the VR to ground. At maximum resistance of 20K ohms you should get about a +0.03v increase. Lower resistance to increase voltage. For those afraid to solder, you can actually pencil shade the resistor circled above to increase voltage alternatively. The original resistance of the pin arrowed should read about 656 ohms. Shading the resistor such that the pin reads 630 ohms will give you a +0.1v boost. Proceed from this linearly, but always measure resistance before powering up the PC so that you don't overvolt!

 

Memory Voltage for this board goes up to 2.4v selectable from BIOS. Very decent allowance, but there are some who love to feed even higher voltages to their Memory when they find those that scale well.

So, read your current Memory Voltage from the spot on the MOSFET marked above. This is located beside the PCIE x16 slot. You can solder a 20K Ohms Variable Resistor to the pin arrowed, connecting the other leg of VR to ground to increase the Memory voltage. Set at Maximum of 20K ohms, you get a 0.06v boost upwards. Tune down resistance further to increase voltage. Alternatively, you can also pencil shade the resistor marked above. Resistance of the pin arrowed should read about 900 ohms. Pencil the resistor such that the pin reads 880 ohms should give you a +0.1v increase. Proceed from this linearly, but always measure resistance before powering up the PC so that you don't overvolt!   

The Verdict

I was glad to test out the board myself to verify the raves on it. On the one hand, I quickly picked out why it was so appealing for many: Straight-forward easy overclocking just about anyone can enjoy with a little read up and effort. And we're not talking about small headroom but more like easy way over 400MHz FSB deals. On the other hand I did come to find that the 3 phase-power can be a rather limiting factor when it comes to extreme overclocking. The performance of this board is pretty good as well, lagging behind very slightly in graphics performance when going up against a much more premium motherboard, yet holding it's own in 2D performance. But the most appealing aspect of it would be the price- USD$ 150 (SGD$ 250) for a good motherboard supporting the latest chipset and latest processor is defintiely a good deal. For that alone would warrant a recommendation, but top it off with great and easy overclocking capabilities definitely motivates me enough to search for that dusty BestBuy medal to pin on this piece of hardware.