| Gigabyte P35-DQ6 S775 Motherboard Review |
| by sswilson | July 14, 2007 |
| Gigabyte P35-DQ6 S775 Motherboard Review  Gigabyte GA-P35-DQ6 Review Price: $316:20 CDN NCIX Availability: In Stock Manufacturer's Part Number: GA-P35-DQ6 Warranty: 3 Year Limited Table of Contents
Based in Taiwan, Gigabyte has been a major player in the IT sector since 1986. Best known in North America as a manufacturer of motherboards for all platforms, it has in recent years expanded its market to include a full range of consumer products from water cooling to cases and beyond. Today we're going to be looking at Gigabyte's GA-P35-DQ6 S775 motherboard based on Intel's latest P35 chipset.  Packaging Right from the get-go it's obvious that this motherboard is targeting the high end consumer market. This package isn't meant to be delivered by mail hidden from sight with brown paper, it's clearly intended to be displayed prominently on a store shelf. If the sheer size and heft of the package doesn't catch your eye, the high quality design and cut-away view of the motherboard inside certainly will.   The rear of the box, and inner leaf offer a full description of the motherboard's specs, as well as a good explanation of the special features.  The bundled accessories are yet another indicator of the P35-DQ6's intended market. Quad everything, including 4 X Sata cables, 4 X eSata (on two rear brackets), as well as 4 X USB (on two rear brackets). 2 Molex-Sata power cables (for non-powered eSata devices), Floppy & IDE ribbons, a colour coded I/O shield, driver disk, Generic S775 motherboard Multi-Language quick install guide, and an exceptionally well written & illustrated English manual round out the accessories package. Features Based on Intel's latest chipset, this board incorporates all of the features needed to run Intel's next generation of Core 2 processors, as well as support for high end DDR 2 PC2-8500. The full specs can be found here.... Gigabyte GA-P35-DQ6 Specifications
Motherboard Layout  This picture doesn't do justice to the range of colours on this board. Blue PCB sets the background for the ultra-bright components. This paired with the massive “Silent-Pipe” heatsink gives the board a presence which cannot easily be dismissed. Love it or hate it, there won't be too many fence sitters when it comes time to express an opinion on Gigabyte's choice of colours for this board. Dram slots follow the industry standard of using same colour slots for dual channel, and in what seems to be a trend, are positioned against normal case airflow. Additional cooling for the memory might be in order for high mem overclocks. Plenty of clearance for a stock cooler, but due to the placement of the all-in-one heatsink it would be advisable to research the footprint of aftermarket coolers prior to purchasing one for this board. Connections are well laid out for cable management. The 8 pin CPU power connector could ideally be placed closer to the 24 pin power connector (upper forward), but it's location (upper aft) still allows for easy routing of the cable out of the airflow. All components appear to be high quality, and according to the literature, are designed with high efficiency / low heat / long life in mind.  The “Silent-Pipe” heatsink continues on with two plates attached to the back of the board. This provides additional cooling for standard set-ups, but the larger one will need to be removed for CPU cooling solutions requiring their own backplate.  Standard rear layout. 4X USB, Firewire, Lan, Legacy Serial / Parallel ports, 7.1 audio, and both coax + optical S/PDIF connectors.   The front panel audio riser obviously presented a problem when they were designing this board around the main portion of the heatsink, but as you can see in the picture above, they solved any access issues by raising it up off of the board. On the right you can see the 2 pin C-MOS reset jumpers (center right, just above the battery). There were no access problems with a single card setup, but it would be a bit tight with a two slot cooling video card in the secondary slot. It's important to note that because of the Dual Bios setup of this board, these jumpers weren't used even once during three weeks of testing.  As with all newer motherboards, ideally your PSU should have an 8 pin ATX_12V power connector. The board can be powered using just a 4 pin ATX_12V, however, stability for high OCs (especially with quad core or Extreme Edition CPUs) would probably be adversely affected. Installation Standard configurations offer no installation issues, but those with aftermarket air or water cooling setups with backplates will require the removal of the “Crazy Cool Heatsink” from the back of the motherboard. The manual offers full instructions for this procedure, and is for the most part well written, fully illustrated, and easy to follow. There is however, one glaring omission. “Before unfastening the spring screw as circled in the picture to the left, first remove the copper fin marked with “SILENT-PIPE”.” What they've left out of the instructions is the fact that the “copper fin” is simply glued to the top of the heatsink, and only requires a little force to remove. Some folks (like this reviewer), not knowing that it is glued on, might not want to exert enough force to remove it for fear of damaging the whole heatsink. The process can be carried out without removing the fin, but it's a lot easier to do with direct access to the screw hole.   This cover must be removed for installation of an aftermarket backplate.   Accessing this screw is a lot easier when you know the cover is just glued on. Bios Features The heart of any overclocking system board is the bios feature set. Let's have a look at what's been offered with this board. These photos reflect the most recent F4 bios version.  Main Bios page looks promising. First thing that catches the eye are the F11 and F12 selections for saving and loading C-Mos presets. Not listed here (but mentioned at least twice in the manual) is the requirement to select CTRL-F1 to enable enhanced memory settings on the main overclocking screen.   C-Mos load and save screens. Total of 8 save slots. This is an invaluable feature which allows easy access to different memory / CPU multi / FSB combinations. Being able to quickly switch between different configurations makes light work of finding the best settings in order to maximize performance.  PC Health screen. Pretty standard fare here. Listing actual values for the voltages would have been much more useful than an ambiguous “OK”.   MB Intelligent Tweaker (M.I.T.) screen. This is Gigabyte's main overclocking screen. On the left is the standard page, selecting CTRL-F1 from the main bios page will unlock the enhanced memory settings as shown in the picture on the right. First time overclockers will want to leave the memory settings alone while working on their initial overclock, however once a stable OC is found, use of these settings is vital for achieving maximum performance. CPU clock ratio, clock control, frequency, and PCIe frequency are self explanatory. C.I.A. 2 is Gigabyte's “Auto” overclocking feature, and as such allows the selection of an automatic overclock based on a % of stock speeds. These kinds of features may have been useful years ago, but in all honesty the maximum selectable % is so low compared to what can be achieved by raising FSB, it's not worth looking at.  Robust Graphics Booster apparently boosts PCIe speeds. Why this is included as a setting is unclear as we already have a PCIe freq adjustment. It may be semantics, but a Default or Disabled setting would be preferable rather than Auto / Fast / Turbo.   Memory frequencies are set using a multiplier which converts to a divider based on FSB. The Performance Enhance on the right is a new feature in the F4 bios. It does improve bandwidth, but as we'll see later in the review will hopefully be expanded further in future bios updates.      Fairly robust selections of overvolt settings are available. With a Max CPU of 2.35V and DDR2 of 3.35V there's certainly more than enough voltage here for folks to fry their hardware if they're not careful. The only real complaint with these settings is the fact that only Vcore is displayed as an actual value. The rest are listed as “+XX” to default. That's fine and dandy, except that there is no indication of what default is, thus no real clue as to what values are being selected. Overclocking Test Setup
Benchmark / Stability tests were performed using fully updated Windows XP Home SP2. Motherboard drivers were those provided on the install disk. ATI Cat 7.6 drivers were used for graphics benchmarks. Bios was flashed to latest F4 version. Memory was set with a divider for highest clockspeed (531 5:6 divider). Memset Vers. 3.3 used to set “performance level” to 6. Max OC was 8 hours Orthos / 3DMark 06 / Dual Super-Pi / 5 days 24-7 SMP client folding Stable. Initial post at stock speeds (original bios version) correctly detected CPU & Memory SPD. Default DRAM voltage is 1.8V, & DRAM set to DDR 800. All voltage settings above stock (except for Vcore) are displayed in BIOS only as “+ .XX” volts above default so users would be well advised to verify the correct operating voltage for their particular memory, and then ensure they do their math before changing DRAM voltage in BIOS. Enhanced Memory settings are hidden by default and can only be unlocked in bios by selecting CTRL-F1 from the main bios screen. Board easily achieved a maximum stable CPU OC of 3544 / 443 FSB with Vcore of 1.55 (Speedfan reports 1.52V), and minor bumps to chipset voltage. CPU is a newer stepping which appears to top out at aprox. 450 FSB, so the absence of a “Max FSB” above 450 is reflective of CPU limitations and not the motherboard. Memory OC on this board seemed to prefer high clock speeds on a divider over tighter timings 1-1. Stable memory OC was 1062 5-5-5-15 5:6 divider with relatively tight secondary timings for that clock speed. Memory Voltage was set to “+.40V” (2.2V).  Of special note during overclocking / testing was the ability to recover from a no-post bios selection without requiring a C-Mos reset. Not once during testing did the dual Bios setup fail to recover thus forcing a hard reset. Benchmarks Comparison board for benchmarks was a DFI Infinity P965-S Dark. All hardware & benchmarking software was identical except for firmware revision 3.AAC on the HD, and ATI Cat version 7.5. DFI MAX OC was 3560 FSB 445, DFI Memory was 890 1:1 4-4-4-10. P35-DQ6 MAX OC was as above. 3544 FSB 443 Memory 1062 5:6 5-5-5-15.  Almost identical scores between the two boards. The DFI edges out the Gigabyte by the slightest of margins, but certainly not by any statistically significant amount. The differences in OC results are well within what we would expect to see with the slightly lower Max OC on the Gigabyte.  Slight edge to the Gigabyte board in stock Total & GFX benches, the rest go to the DFI. The difference in the OC Total is surprising considering the OC GFX & CPU scores are almost identical.  Overall have to give this one to the Gigabyte board. The margins for the DFI + columns aren't large enough to call them clear wins, yet those for the Gigabyte are obvious with 10+ FPS.  Once again the DFI edges the Gigabyte out ever so slightly. We can try to blame the lower OC score on the slightly lower MAX OC for the Gigabyte, but the stock scores suggest that the memory settings might benefit from some tweaks.  Initially, this test raised some eyebrows, and ultimately taught this reviewer an important lesson about taking any benchmark result with a grain of salt. The DFI is in my personal rig, and not wishing to lose my OS install, I purchased what I thought was an identical HD for use during this review. Once these results were in, several fruitless hours were spent pouring through the manual, trying different bios settings, and booting the drive from every open SATA header on the Gigabyte board in an attempt to explain the obvious shortcoming in burst speed. After all other attempts to explain the problem failed, a quick trip through google revealed that Seagate had changed firmware on it's newer drives (same part #) and that those newer drives did not bench as well as those with older firmware versions. As you can see from the fifth column in the chart above, once the older drive was slaved into the Gigabyte review system, the benchmark results are virtually identical to the same drive on the DFI system.  Time to generate a little controversy. Either due to the nature of the high clock / loose timings this board preferred to run the Supertalent memory at, or the way it scales the NB strap at higher FSB, the initial bandwidth benchmarks were well below what was expected. Research showed that there was a memory “performance” setting in bios for the P35 chipset which had not been made available in the current version of this bios, yet was easily accessed using version 3.3 of the windows memory tweaking program Memset. Unlike other memory tweakers, Memset does not have a startup registry hook which could render windows unbootable, nor does it physically change the bios settings. All settings in both windows and Bios return to normal on reboot. In order to give this motherboard the full benefit of the doubt in the hope that this feature will be enabled in future bios upgrades all benchmarking and testing (including the full slate of stability testing) was carried out with the “performance” setting changed from 10 to 6. We'll let the results speak for themselves. All in all, there are no big surprises in the benchmarking data seen here. Many on-line sightings of this board have reported similar overclocking results with newer dual core chips, as well as little to no performance benefit over the P965 chipset. It should also be noted that the bios on the DFI board has been in development for quite some time and has been tweaked to squeeze out every bit of performance, sometimes at the expense of stability, or ease of use. The fact that this Gigabyte board performed so well while sporting a relatively immature bios bodes well for the future. The true measure of the P35-DQ9's performance will only be apparent once the bios matures a bit and it gets a chance to stretch it's legs with the next gen Intel processors (or possibly finds a different reviewer with a quad core chip laying around). Long-term testing I've been using this board for 3+ weeks now so I'd like to offer a few personal observations over and above what you'd see in a standard review. Memory overclocking on this board is without a doubt the easiest I have ever seen. Dividers are plentiful, and the Auto settings do an excellent job of scaling to looser timings (well beyond SPD settings) to allow for the highest mem clocks with minimal tweaking required by the user. This ease of use does come with a price. The settings are much looser than required for stability, so tweaking of the individual settings after the fact is a must for maximum performance. Bios release F4 offered a new memory “performance” setting of either Normal, Turbo, or Extreme, however this doesn't go far enough in pushing memory performance. If past experience with their other high end boards is any indication, Gigabyte will continue to offer incremental performance tweaks through bios upgrades. Until that time, it appears that maximum memory performance will only be achieved through use of a third party memory tweak such as Memset (vers. 3.3 was used for this review). I'm not normally a fan of software overclocking tweaks, but both the chipset and the motherboard are relatively new so I felt it was the only fair way to demonstrate the full performance capabilities of this combination. The fact that Memset is not run as a registry tweak was what finally made that decision for me. I made a note of it in the overclocking section, but I'd like to again stress how well the Dual Bios has been implemented on this board. Similar to my experience with the scaling of the Auto mem settings, this is the first time I've encountered a board that didn't once require a C-Mos reset while feeling out its upper limits. The max stable overclock on this board came up just shy of what I achieved with the DFI Dark, but it's so small a difference that the results are well within what would be expected even between two identical motherboards. On-line research and discussions with HC posters who have had hands on experience with this board suggest that it really shines when paired with a quad core CPU. On a final note, I do have a small bone to pick with Gigabyte concerning their driver disk. I understand the need to examine all possible revenue streams, but IMO at this price point they should not have included Yahoo Toolbar & Macrovision's Software Update as part of their installation disk. Yahoo Toolbar is a no-brainer, and while some might argue that the software manager (auto-updating software for the DMIinfo program) isn't crapware, I have issues with any program installing itself without my knowledge or consent, especially those which require me to visit their website to download an app to uninstall them. `Nuff said. Conclusion Gigabyte has a winner on its hands here. Combining Intel's latest chipset for support of next generation hardware with a full featured motherboard, above average overclocking abilities, and eye catching consumer packaging, the P35-DQ6 should be flying off the shelves as we lead up to the release of Intel's new 1333 FSB CPUs. In terms of performance (specifically memory), there is still some work to be done through bios updates. That said, Gigabyte has a good track record when it comes to providing bios updates to improve stability and performance and has already demonstrated it's commitment to that goal by recently releasing the F4 Bios update. Making use of a Dual Bios setup provides an almost fool proof recovery from too-tight bios settings. This, paired with the ease of memory overclocking, makes the board an excellent choice for folks looking for a painless entry into the world of overclocking. Without nitpicking, the only real downside I can find with the P35-DQ6 is the price, and that isn't a fault, it's simply a reality of the marketplace. This product is priced to fit the demand of it's target audience. Unfortunately for us working stiffs, top of the line hardware based on the newest technology can and does fetch a premium. Just as we can't all afford a QX6700, most of us will have to wait for the price to drop, or settle for one of the mid priced P35 chipset boards. Since I can't find any real fault other than being priced for what it is, and based on the ease of overclocking, Gigabyte's P35-DQ6 is the recipient of my very first DAM GOOD award! Pros
Cons
 We would like to thank NCIX for providing this board for review. Please visit the review comment thread here..... http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/intel...q6-review.html         |
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