Introduction

Recently overclockers have been given a wide birth when its comes to how far you can go - in fact, there is more emphasis on the ability to get more speed out of your CPU, Memory and Motherboards than ever before. This is pretty much evident with nVidia, ATI and yes even Intel getting in on the action on the chipset front. Can you say, “P965”?

AMD was clearly the first company to embrace overclockers. While in the past they have tried to thwart them with unlocked multipliers on their processors. Now if you want to do it without restrictions, its a matter of paying extra dollars to do so. AMD calls this the Athlon FX line, and Intel calls it the Extreme line.

While both Intel and AMD are giving you the option to overclock your CPU, you need a board that can actually do it. While actively denying overclocking in the past on their own Desktop boards, Intel’s 975X and P965 chipsets have been overclocking power houses using the latest Core 2 Duo chips, especially the P965 with bus speeds of well over 400MHz easily being obtained without special voltage mods or what not.

Today Intel joins overclockers by giving them the option of overclocking on their very own desktop boards and who would have ever thought such a thing? This is definitely a first for the big CPU giant who tried to prevent overclocking by introducing locked multipliers and even removing asynchronous bus clocks in its early PCI Express 915 chips.

Today we have Intel’s D975XBX2 or Bad Axe 2 motherboard in our test labs. This board was originally intended to be the flagship board for the Core 2 Quad. While we did have it to use for the Core 2 Quad, we decided to use our trusty Gigabyte DQ6 for our CPU review, as its proven to overclock to the max. This time we are looking at the board which Intel provided and just to see how well it stacks up to the mother of all Core 2 overclocking boards, the Gigabyte P965 DQ6.