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With the recent launch and our coverage of the Core 2 Duo, the hype of Conroe has been replaced with very real excitement.   Yes Conroe is very much a powerhouse.  Yes it is the hottest CPU to be released in as long as is worth remembering in this fast paced industry.  And yes, apparently demand is huge.  Stores that we know of are still waiting to take pre-orders, but we've been told there's a pre-order "queue".  With this type of CPU demand comes the real need for motherboards.

As you recall in our Conroe coverage, Gigabyte was kind enough to send us their new GA-965P-DQ6 motherboard for review.  Ours was a pre-production motherboard with an alpha BIOS, and yet it was remarkably stable and offered us a good look at just what this board offered.

The GA-965P-DQ6 is the top of the line of P965 motherboards Gigabyte has released. Gigabyte's strategy for Core 2 Duo at this point is to focus on the P965 chipset and not  the Conroe capable refresh of the 975.  As a result, they have a huge lineup of P965 boards.  The "DQ6" stands for "Durability Enhanced, 6-Quad Features" - which also includes the "S-Features".   You may ask, what are these features?

Durability Enhanced:

• All solid state capacitors for longer lifetime

6-Quad Features:

• Quad BIOS - four copies of the BIOS, two on flash rom, one on HD, one on CD
• Quad Cooling - four heatsinks for the motherboard chipset, Crazy Cool heatsink on the back
• Quad Triple phase - total of twelve power phases to deliver steadier power and current at lower temperatures
• Quad eSATA2 - four external Sata2 3Gb/sec ports for expandibility
• Quad Core Read - will support quad core processors
• Quad DDR2 slots - four DDR2 slots

After we get past the Gigabyte marketing departments stretching everything possible to be labeled "Quad" we are still left with two significant items - the twelve power phases and four eSata connectors!

The "DQ" series is the enthusiast class boards of Gigabyte's 965 lineup.  There's also a more mainstream series called the "S Series", which for instance the recently announced GA-965P-DS3.  The S series consists of the "S-Features", which the high end DQ6 also has:

S-Features:

• Silent-Pipe - chipset cooling without fans for low noise systems
• Speed - extensive overclocking / tweaking settings and utilities
• Smart - easy flashing from Windows or even the BIOS
• Safe - dual bios, s.m.a.r.t. support for HD's, saved BIOS settings and health monitoring

This board is NOT short of features.

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 we received 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.

Here is the GA-965P-DQ6 in all its glory:

The motherboard is quite feature full, here are its specifications (from Gigabyte's site):

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

Before taking a closer look at the motherboard, let's take a quick look at the new P965 chipset...

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