Board layout

With so many features built onto the motherboard, there isn’t a lot of unused space on the GA-965P-DQ6.

We’ll start by talking about storage. As we stated earlier, the P965 chipset natively supports up to six Serial ATA drives, so it’s no surprise to see six SATA ports on the GA-965P-DQ6. But if you look closer you’ll notice two additional purple SATA ports bringing total support for up to eight SATA drives. These additional SATA ports as well as the motherboard’s parallel ATA connector are driven by JMicron’s JMB363 storage controller. The JMB363 supports up to two 3Gb/sec SATA drives with NCQ as well as one parallel ATA/133 channel (supporting up to two drives), utilizing PCI Express x1 to accomplish this.

Gigabyte color codes everything, including the SATA ports: the fluorescent orange SATA ports are driven natively by the chipset, while the purple SATA ports are controlled by the JMB363 controller. Gigabyte even color codes headers, like the USB and SPDIF headers, as well as the DIMM sockets, PCI Express slots, and even the pins for hooking the motherboard up to your case. This makes installation much easier, especially for inexperienced computer users.

Dual PCIe graphics slots

Cramming so many features onto the GA-965P-DQ6 is an impressive feat, particularly since the board relies on the standard ATX form factor, with the board measuring in at 305x244mm. But as you can imagine this does present a challenge getting everything on the board without running into issues.

For starters the board’s IDE connector is located awfully low on the motherboard. This could present a problem for those of you with larger cases that have your optical drives located at the top of the case – your IDE cable simply may not be long enough to accommodate this. It would be nice if the IDE connector were a little higher up on the motherboard.

The CPU fan header is also placed below the LGA-775 socket. This is a less than ideal location as you have to run your CPU’s fan cable back across the fan. In other words, the fan cable could potentially get caught in your CPU fan. Fortunately Intel provides clips on their CPU cooler so you can neatly arrange the fan cable, but most aftermarket CPU coolers don’t have this feature. Most of the LGA-775 motherboards on the market have the CPU fan header placed above the LGA-775 socket for this reason.

The Theater 550 Pro card won't fit here

Another gripe we have with the GA-965P-DQ6’s layout is the location of the uppermost PCI Express x1 slot: it’s located too high on the motherboard. As a result, the uppermost PCI Express slot is basically unusable for any long x1 PCI Express card. For example, our PowerColor Theater 550 Pro PCI Express TV tuner card won’t fit in the uppermost slot because it bumps up against the heatsink cooling the chipset’s North Bridge. When using a dual-slot graphics card like the Radeon X1900 XTX, the only useable PCI Express slot is the x1 slot on the very bottom, which rests just above the secondary PEG slot.

All these aforementioned gripes are relatively minor though, and can be overcome relatively easily with the right placement of system components. Again, considering the sheer amount of features Gigabyte has integrated on the GA-965P-DQ6, it’s practically impossible to get a perfect board layout. Our biggest grievance though goes to the Crazy Cool cooling on the underside of the motherboard. Quite simply, the cooler gets in the way of several aftermarket coolers that require the use of a back plate on the underside of the CPU to mount the fan.