Introduction

With the arrival of Intel’s Core 2 CPUs, the PC hardware industry is going through a renaissance of sorts: end users are excited about CPU upgrading once again.

It’s not that the CPU industry has been boring lately, in fact, far from it. We are after all only a little over 12 months out from the debut of the first wave of dual-core CPUs. But the first-generation dual-core chips were prohibitively expensive, and the software infrastructure wasn’t really in place to take advantage of dual-core processing: while Moore’s Law is alive and well in the PC hardware industry, in the software realm it’s the complete opposite. In fact, “when it’s done” is the mantra repeated over and over again by the software industry’s leading developers. In any case, end users are excited about upgrading like never before because of one thing: rapidly falling prices.

$250 can get you a lot of CPU nowadays. Looking over the latest CPU prices on Price Watch, with $250 you can buy a shiny new Athlon 64 X2 4200+ and still have over $50 left over that you can invest in a new motherboard or GPU. A year ago the X2 4200+ sold for well north of $500 buy itself!

But the CPU everyone wants to get a hold of right now is without a doubt Intel’s Core 2 CPU.

The Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6

The board is dominated by its cooling

Thanks to its revamped micro-architecture, Core 2 boasts more performance than any other CPU on the market right now. The chip features a wider execution core. Unlike previous CPUs, Core 2 is a four-wide architecture, it can issue four instructions at the beginning of the pipeline and retire four at the end. Intel has also widened Core 2’s SSE engine, allowing 128-bit SSE, SSE2 and SSE3 instructions to execute within only one clock cycle. This would require two clock cycles on previous CPUs. Core 2 also features a shorter 14-stage pipeline, allowing the CPU to perform more work per clock cycle.

Intel has also tweaked Core 2’s cache memory subsystem, adding two prefetchers per L1 and L2 cache as well as adopting a new unified L2 cache: the CPU’s L2 cache can be allocated dynamically to each of the processor’s two cores as-needed, increasing efficiency.

All this adds up to a processor that’s capable of delivering more performance than anything else on the market right now. On top of this, Intel has priced Core 2 to move, with official list prices starting well under $200 (keep in mind this is distributor pricing, not the CPU’s street price). As a result, the question a lot of end users are asking right now is what motherboard is best for Core 2?

For a lot of early adopters, the answer to that question has been Gigabyte. Part of the reason why this has occurred is due to bang for the buck. Quite simply, Gigabyte’s Core 2-ready offerings are loaded with features. Rather than offering a mixture of Core 2-ready motherboards based on Intel’s 975X and P965 chipsets, Gigabyte has instead concentrated on the latter option, P965, leaving their 975X lineup unchanged so they can instead focus on providing a flurry of P965 motherboards in a wide variety of configurations and price points. Right now Gigabyte has P965 motherboards with street prices ranging from about $130 to well over $200+. The motherboard we’re reviewing today, the GA-965P-DQ6 (or DQ6 for short) is Gigabyte’s flagship Core 2-ready motherboard and it’s got quite a few features that allow it to stand out from the crowd of P965 motherboards.

GA-965P-DQ6 with Zalman cooling

Plenty of space for large coolers

Before we get started on discussing the motherboard however, let’s first go over some of the differences between the P965 and 975X chipsets. A lot of people seem to be confused over which chipset is best for their needs, hopefully this will provide a bit more insight into the issue.