Gigabyte 965P-DQ6 Rev 3.3 - There's more room for improvement?

The computer world was shocked, to say the least, when Intel finally decided to put the Netburst architecture to rest, as well as the Pentium branding. It was quite possibly since the Pentium 4 put a rather sour taste in the computer public's mouth - it was indeed time to start fresh, and the Core branding is a new name for a new architecture, well sort of. The name may be new but the architecture is actually a combination of the Pentium-M design coupled with the FSB and signalling systems that the Netburst system used.

Intel sent waves through the world of IT with their P965 Express chipset. It was intended to be the mid-range chipset under the 975X chipset. While this may have been the intention, it wasn't how it ended up. 975X has been around since the Pentium Extreme 800 series CPU; it lacks native DDR2-800 memory support as well as support for high FSB overclocking and the improved ICH8 series Southbridge. There was only one single thing that saved the 975X at first, it was the only Intel chipset to have AMD Crossfire dual graphics support but this all changed when AMD and ATI ratified P965 with Crossfire capabilities, now 975X takes a back seat to the P965.

One of our first motherboard to come into our labs based on the P965 Express chipset was the Gigabyte P965-DQ6. This board had it all - great overclocking, plenty of features onboard as well as a great look and feel. Gigabyte did have a few issues with this board in terms of stability, a few samples refused to work properly, this produced a 2.0 revision. While this may have been enough, Gigabyte sporting its new Gigabyte United name still wasn't fully happy and has now brought out a new revision 3.3 model which on paper looks to be fantastic. The newly formed company is quite serious about making their motherboards the highest quality in the industry with improvements such as All-Solid Capacitor designs using the most expensive components from Japan.

Today we will explore the revision 3.3 DQ6 motherboard as there have been quite a few changes made to the overall design. We'll check out those new changes and then compare it to the first DQ6 released and against one of the best P965 motherboards we have tested so far, the ASUS Commando.

Let's get started and see what we have here!