The motherboard

Quest for more performance issue 2: the motherboard

Don’t take this the wrong way, but when was the last time you saw an Intel motherboard in an enthusiast’s system? The answer is never!

This is not because Intel’s desktop motherboards are bad, on the contrary they’re good boards, but they’re just not designed to wring every last bit of performance out of the CPU. Instead they’re focused on delivering solid reliability, particularly when it comes to system stability, and this often directly contradicts with getting more performance out of the CPU. As a result the Core 2-ready Intel D975XBX motherboard we tested with on Friday doesn’t offer BIOS options for tweaking many common system parameters like front-side bus speeds, as this can obviously impact the stability of the system. Instead it offers just enough to let you dabble a little bit with tweaking, but not enough where you can really damage the motherboard or its components, including the Core 2 CPU inside.

If you want a motherboard built for tweaking, you’ve really got to go with one of the third-party motherboard manufacturers like ASUS, abit, DFI, Gigabyte, or MSI. All of these manufacturers build motherboards that are not only more feature-rich than Intel’s D975XBX, but they’re also highly tweakable. Inside the BIOS of these motherboards you’ll find a wealth of options for fine-tuning the performance of not only your CPU, but other system components such as the graphics card and memory.

ASUS P5B Deluxe

The P5B Deluxe has dual PEG slots

Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6

The GA-965P-DQ6 also has heatpipe cooling

Already we’ve received high-end motherboards from both ASUS and Gigabyte – the P5W DH Deluxe and P5B Deluxe from ASUS and Gigabyte’s GA-965P-DQ6 – all three motherboards offer a ton of features that are not only going to appeal to those of you that just want to squeeze a little more performance out of your system, but also anyone looking to build a silent or near silent system: neither motherboard requires a chipset fan, instead they utilize heat pipe technology for cooling.

The good part though is that the BIOS for all of these motherboards provide the proper memory multipliers to run the system’s DDR2 memory at 1,066MHz; options of 533MHz, 667MHz, 711MHz, 800MHz, 889MHz, and 1066 are available, and of course asynchronous operation is easy to setup and works perfectly, so you can run the FSB and memory bus at different speeds. Both ASUS and Gigabyte’s motherboards also have special BIOS settings that you can enable to tweak performance even further, but these are their own proprietary techniques to boost performance and go outside the focus of this article, which is focused on boosting the memory bus to improve performance.

Tweaking Core 2 with the ASUS P5W DH

Memory speeds adjustable

With the right motherboard and memory modules in hand, we’ve now got all the ingredients we need to start testing Core 2 at higher memory speeds. Let’s get started!