Gigabyte P965-QD6

While we did look at this board before in our P965 chipset review, we didn't really get a chance to look at it as closely as we would have liked. The board is a full ATX layout with extremely good placement of connectors.

The 24-pin power along with the FDD connector sit behind the DDR-2 memory slots. The 4/8 pin power connector sits between the Mosfet heat sinks and the rear I/O well out of the CPU's way.

First off you may find getting large heatsinks into this board a bit of a fight since its rigged more for the water cooling users where you don't need as much space around the CPU. For power, Gigabyte has a 12 phase voltage system - that's right, 12 phases to keep that CPU fed with stable voltage. The Mosfets are cooled passively by heat sinks and heatpipes cooling the Southbridge and Northbridge.

The rear I/O of the board looks almost identical to that of the DS3. While Gigabyte doesn't put any e.SATA ports on the rear I/O section, it does include expansion cables that take up slots on the rear of the case that convert the internal SATA ports to e.SATA ports.

In all the boards we have here, the Gigabyte DQ6 was the only one to avail itself of supporting Crossfire. There are 2 PCI Express x16 slots on the board. The top blue one runs at full-speed while the orange only runs at x4 speed through the Southbridge. 3 PCI Express x1 slots and 2 PCI slots make up the expansion configuration.

The DQ6, like the DS3, uses the same JMicron chip renamed with 2 SATA ports and 1 PATA ports to give the IDE support the board needs for connecting DVD drives. The DQ6, unlike the DS3, has support for Firewire thanks to the Texas Instruments PCI Firewire chip.