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The GA-965P-DQ6 motherboard is Gigabyte's P965 implementation for Conroe. It uses the latest ICH8R, and provides a good selection of on-board peripherals.

As Gigabyte was kind enough to send us one of their very few pre-production boards, we did not get the manual, cables etc. that will be in the retail kit - we got the box, motherboard, Conroe E6700 and a CDR with drivers.

As this is not a review, I will not go into great lengths on the board yet - I have to leave something to write about for the review, and I also have to keep the size of this article under control - but I want to mention that the board looked well laid out, and was clearly color coded.

We had difficulty getting good memory performance with the initial BIOS, and Gigabyte was kind enough to email an alpha version of the next BIOS - which improved the memory bandwidth significantly (more on this in our upcoming motherboard review); not to mention allow for far greater overclocking.

As you can see this board has a heatpipe design for cooling the chipset - what you can't see here is the additional cooler plate attached to the bottom of the board below the processor's socket.

Specification - from Gigabyte.com Processor LGA775 for Intel® Core™2 Extreme / Core™2 Duo Supports 1066/800/533 MHz FSB Chipset Northbridge: Intel® P965 Express Chipset Southbridge: Intel® ICH8R Gigabit LAN Controller (Marvell 8053) Realtek ALC888DD Channel Audio Codec Memory Supports DDR2 800/667/533 memory Dual Channel architecture support up to 8GB by 4 DIMM slots Expansion Slots 2 x PCI Express X16 slot(x16, x4) 3 x PCI Express X1 slots 2 x PCI slots Form Factor ATX form factor, 305 x 244mm Internal I/O Connectors 8 x Serial ATA 3Gb/s connector 1 x UDMA ATA 100/66/33 connector 1 x FDD connector 3 x USB 2.0/1.1 connectors (support 6 ports) 1 x audio pin header (support 8-Channel) 1 x S/PDIF In pin header 2 x IEEE1394 connector Rear Panel I/O 4 x USB 2.0/1.1 ports 1 x RJ45 port 1 x COM port 1 x LPT port 6 x audio jacks 1 x IEEE1394 1 x Optical SPDIF OUT 1 x Coaxial SPDIF OUT PS/2 Keyboard/Mouse Unique Features Durability Enhanced- All Solid Capacitor Motherboard Silent Pipe Cooling Over-clocking Enhanced

I liked the board, and I will review it in detail in the very near future. Hopefully there will be a newer BIOS by then :)

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