GA-965P-DQ6 Features

Lots of goodies onboard

A shot of the lower half of the motherboard

For their GA-965P-DQ6 motherboard Gigabyte has loaded the board with features, after all, Gigabyte refers to it as their first six-quad motherboard. The so-called “six-Quad” consists of the following features:

Quad-core ready

With the initial Core 2 launch now behind them, Intel’s now focusing their efforts on releasing follow-up Core 2 CPUs at higher clock speeds (up to 3.2GHz for the Extreme Edition) as well as their first CPU with four processor cores (quad-core) codenamed “Kentsfield”, which will be released in the fourth quarter of this year.

Kentsfield’s implementation is a little different though than today’s latest dual-core processors, as Intel’s essentially fusing together two “Conroe” Core 2 CPU die into one package. This implementation is a little less than ideal as the front-side bus linking the two CPU die ends up bottlenecking performance; as a result many expect Kentsfield will essentially perform similarly to an SMP setup with two dual-core processors inside. We won’t see the first quad-core chips built using a single piece of silicon until Intel transitions to their smaller 45-nanometer manufacturing process in 2007.

In any case, when Kentsfield is released, Gigabyte expects the GA-965P-DQ6 to be ready. All end users will likely need is a BIOS upgrade to support the new processor. Gigabyte feels they can proudly proclaim quad-core support in part due to the GA-965P-DQ6’s next feature: quad triple phase power.

Quad triple-phase

Gigabyte’s GA-965P-DQ6 is the first motherboard on the market to support 12-phase power. In comparison, Intel’s flagship D975XBX Core 2 motherboard is limited to just 5-phase power, while many of the high-end enthusiast motherboards from manufacturers like ASUS support up to 8 power phases.

With 12-phase power, the GA-965P-DQ6 is more capable of supplying your CPU with a steady flow of power at even the most extreme clock speeds.

Quad cooling

This feature refers to the GA-965P-DQ6’s Silent Pipe cooling solution, which uses a combination of copper heat-pipes and heatsinks to cool the North and South Bridge of the P965 chipset, as well as the board’s MOSFETs. Finally Gigabyte includes their “Crazy Cool” copper block on the underside of the motherboard, which is designed to help keep board temperatures down.

As its name implies, Gigabyte’s Silent Pipe cooler runs completely silent. The system uses no active fans to keep the motherboard’s components cool, instead relying completely on a combination of copper heat-pipes and copper heatsinks to keep everything cool. The North Bridge of the chipset runs fairly warm, so Gigabyte uses two heat-pipes here, and of course you can’t miss the massive heatsinks Gigabyte uses to cool the MOSFETs. One heatsink is even labeled “6-Quad”.

We’ll have more details on this cooling solution on the next page.

I/O connections

LGA-775 socket is free of obstructions

Quad BIOS

One feature Gigabyte has prided themselves on is their BIOS recovery subsystem, a feature that’s been a hallmark of Gigabyte motherboards for well over 5 years now. Not only does Gigabyte provide two distinct BIOS chips on their GA-965P-DQ6 motherboard (one BIOS is the primary while the second chip serves as a backup BIOS), Gigabyte also includes a third copy of the board’s BIOS that you can recover from on CD, while a fourth copy can be saved to your system’s hard drive.

In essence, Gigabyte provides one primary BIOS and three different backup BIOS options that you can use to recover your primary BIOS if it somehow becomes corrupted.

Quad eSATA 2

One of Serial ATA’s advantages over parallel ATA is that like USB, it’s hot-swappable, meaning you can connect or disconnect your Serial ATA drives without powering the system off. When you couple this with the huge capacities of today’s latest Serial ATA hard drives (500GB+), this enters in a new era of semi-portable storage capability.

But how can you take advantage of this if your Serial ATA ports are built on your motherboard? Simple, provide an external Serial ATA header! This is referred to as eSATA, or external Serial ATA.

For their GA-965P-DQ6 motherboard, Gigabyte includes two eSATA headers you can hook up to the back of your system. Each eSATA header supports up to two Serial ATA drives, bringing total support for up to four eSATA devices out-of-the-box.

Quad DDR2 slots

This feature refers to the fact that the GA-965P-DQ6 has four DDR2 DIMM sockets. The P965 chipset can address up to 8GB of RAM, so all high-end P965 motherboards have four DIMMs. In other words, this feature isn’t unique to Gigabyte.