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Unlike the other motherboards in this round up, the Gigabyte P965-DS3 is a standard board, offering standard features with great value. You don't get a second x16 PCI-E slot, but you can get this board for about half the price of Gigabyte's own P965-DQ6. The audio solution remains Realtek's High Definition Audio, though lacking DTS Connect capabilities. Understandably, because of the price, the board's bundle only the bare essentials - one floppy and one IDE data cables, in addition to 4 SATA cables. There's no SATA to ATX power cables, so you should get them if you need them.

Both the northbridge and southbridge are passively cooled with standard heatsinks. There's actually no need to put a fan on the heatsinks. If you use the standard Intel fan / heatsink, the air from the CPU fan is more than enough to cool the northbridge. The same also applies to the southbridge, particularly if you're using Gigabyte's Radeon X1950 Pro with the Zalman cooler. The southbridge and northbridge does get warm to slightly hot to the touch, so make sure you have good airflow inside the case. As far as layout is concerned, we actually like the DS3 more over its high-end sibling, the DQ6. There's more than enough room for one finger between the DIMM module and PCI-E x16 graphics card. IDE and SATA connectors placement are ideal - they sit paralel with the three PCI slots present, using the room between the slots so there should be no problem if you have full length cards installed.

Expansions and Add-Ons

This board is equipped with all the standard equipment you expect: PS/2, serial and printer ports plus 4 USB ports and a complete set of audio ports, including coax and optical SPDIF output. If you're upgrading, you might want to retain any internal USB cables you have - there are three additional USB headers in the board but Gigabyte does not bundle any cables to make use of them. However, there are no Firewire ports available, so users with Firewire hardware might want to get a Firewire add-on card. There are more than enough PCI and x1 PCI-E slots to go around - a total of 3 PCI and 3 x1 PCI-E slots are available for your peripheral needs. Because of the price point, we understand Gigabyte's decision not to pack a more complete bundle for this board. However, we still wish they would've throw in at least one Firewire port and SATA to ATX power cables - it would make life just so much easier for most users.

Tweaking and Overclocking Friendly

One area where the DS3 does not disappoint is in the tweaking and overclocking settings. There are more than enough options and settings available for most users to push this board to the limit. Settings such as the processor's FSB, multiplier, memory ratio, clock and voltage tweaks are available inside the MIB Intelligent Tweaker menu on the BIOS. One thing we'd like for Gigabyte to change is the 'OK' nomenclature for voltage rail values on all their motherboard BIOS. Wouldn't it be so much easier to provide the real values instead of OK /' Fail we now have? Applying different colors - white for OK, yellow for not so OK and red for Fail like what some manufacturers are doing would be great.

In the end, though a very good board in its own right, the Gigabyte P965-DS3 is not without some problems. Here are some we'd like Gigabyte to address: If you're looking for a simple board with great performance, the Gigabyte P965-DS3 is worth a look. It offers most overclocking options to make it a very decent overclocking board and just enough features to satisfy the average user..

MSI P965 Platinum

Intel Pentium 4 / Core socket LGA-775
P965
PCI Express, PCI

Overall Score: 92.5 points



The full specification (taken from MSI's website)

CPU
Supports Socket 775 for Intel® Pentium 4 3xx, 5xx, 6xx, 8xx, 9xx, Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad and Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processors.
Supports FSB 1066/800/533 MHz
Supports EIST technology
Supports Intel® Hyper-Threading technology.
Supports Intel® Dual Core Technology to 800 MHz and up

Chipset
Intel® P965 Chipset
Supports FSB 1066/800/533 MHz.
Supports PCI Express x 16 graphics interface.
Supports dual channel, DDR2 533/667/800

Intel® ICH8R Chipset
Hi-Speed USB (USB2.0) controller, 480Mb/sec, up to 10 ports.
6 SATAII ports with transfer rate up to 3Gb/s.
PCI Master v2.3, I/O APIC.
ACPI 2.0 compliant.
Serial ATA RAID 0, RAID 1 RAID 5 and RAID 10.
Integrated AHCI controller

Memory
Supports four unbuffered DIMM of 1.8 Volt DDR2 SDRAM
Supports up to 8GB memory size (DDR2 533/667).
Supports up to 4GB memory size (DDR2 800).
Supports dual channel DDR2 memory architecture.
Supports DDR2 533/667/800 memory interface.

Expansion Slots
Storage
On-Board IDE/SATA
One Ultra DMA 66/100/133 IDE controller integrated in JMicron® JMB361.
Supports PIO, Bus Master operation modes.
Can connect up to two Ultra ATA drives.

SATAII controller integrated in ICH8R/JMicron® JMB361
Up to 300MB/sec transfer speed.
Six SATAII ports by ICH8R.
One SATAII port by JMicron® JMB361.
Supports AHCI controller with SATA RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5 and RAID 10 (ICH8R).

Audio
High Definition link controller integrated in Intel® ICH8R chip.
Audio codec Realtek® 883.
Compliant with Azalia 1.0 spec.
Flexible 8-channel audio with jack sensing.

LAN
Realtek® RTL8111B
Supports 10/100/1000 Mb/s.
PCI-Express interface.
Supports ACPI Power Management.

Back Panel I/O Ports
Internal I/O Connectors
Form Factor
ATX form factor, 30.5 x 24.5cm

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