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Gigabyte P965-DS3 Motherboard Overclocking Review

Motherboards/Intel S775 by KeithSuppe @ 2007-07-29

The Gigabyte P965-DS3 is arguably the very best 965-based overclocking platform available. Today were dusting off a Rev.1 board which has been replaced by the DS3 Rev 2.0 and 3.3 models. While the board is technically obsolete she´s almost identical to her siblings and they even share many of the same BIOS versions. There are a large number of Rev 1.0 boards at the heart of many systems; this overclocking article is for them and anyone considering a Gigabyte P965-DS3.

Compare Asus P5W DH to GA P965-DS3

P965 vs. 975X The World Turned Upside-down:

As we compare performance (from 266FSB ~ 400FSB) between the Asus P5W DH Deluxe/WiFi and the GA P965-DS3, the supposedly budget 965-chipset out-performed the 975X in many areas. The popular site Neoseeker reached similar results in their GA-P965-DS3 review in which they compared the P96-DS3 to the Foxconn 975X7AB and MSI 975X Platinum among others. The article doesn't specify which BIOS their using, however; simply looking up the BIOS history it couldn't have been later then revision F7 by the date of publication (Nov. 22nd 06). I found no detectable performance difference between the F7 and F10 I settled on, however; there were some stability differences. This was also true of the F12 which didn't seem to work well with the Mushkin memory.

Our first benchmarks begin the SiSoftware Sandra XPI SP2 released to the public in a freeware version in May 2007. Beginning with the Dhrystone ALU portion measured in MIPS.

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The second element to this test is the Whetstone iSSE3 instruction measured in MFLOPS

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Next the Multi-Media test which determines your processor's ability for Multi-Media encoding as opposed to other CPU's. First test is the Integer x8 ISSSE3 measured in it/s.

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Multi-Media also runs Float x4 ISSE2 also measured in it/s.

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Sandra's RAM Bandwidth test may be the most popular and widely used memory bandwidth test used today. First we have the Int Buff'd ISSE2 measured in Megabytes per second.

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Next we have the RAM Float Buff'd ISSE2 also measured in Megabytes per second.

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Finally SuperPi Mod 1.5 which was taken over by XtremeSys.org who added a verification aspect to this benchmark so End-users could compare their scores. To put it simply this tests a system's overall "speed" by running calculations of Pi. Our first run is at 1M.

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Our last benchmark in this section is SuperPi run to 2M.

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Most of the benchmarks are either very close and this might be mundane on the face of t, but were comparing two completely different chipsets. The conditions under which each board was tested were identical using the same water-cooling, Mushkin memory, Leadtek 7950GX2 graphics and the same E6400 I've bee using for almost a year to keep benchmarks repeatable. The P965-DS3 performs and out-performs a board costing twice as much. Of course the P5W DH cannot compare in features it's a hand down winner there, but for straight-up overclocking the GA P965-DS3 is amazing. How does it do in Graphics benchmarks?

Onto 3D performance comparison ->

Comment from Rutar @ 2007/07/29

I digg their bios update utility too.

Comment from Kougar @ 2007/07/30

Nice review of my board, I own the Rev 1 version.

I would like to mention that no one should consider buying any 965P-DS3 unless it is the Rev 3.3 version, which ClubIt has long been selling for the same price as the other models. The Rev 2 added another much needed VRM module to the board to help provide CPU power. Three VRM regs alone is not enough for best results and vdroop. Rev 3.3 adds true FSB1333 support and changed some of the board trace layouts and cap placements to do so.

It is a little strange you had so much issue with your RAM using the F10 or later BIOS's, as I see you did set "Option 2" for the RAM DLL setting. I can say that the Rev1 DS3 did not give stable RAM voltages for me, any voltage setting over 2.1v was unstable with my Corsair ProMOS RAM. I tested the RAM again on a P35-DQ6, and it was stable at 2.15 and 2.2v settings, so clearly the DS3 cannot handle high voltage DDR2 well. Again is why I mention users should only look at Rev 3.3 boards, if not P35 boards instead. Also the DS3 would not support RAM clocked above 1100Mhz, however the DQ6 has no issues running the same Ballistix kit above even 1220MHz.

My top 24 hour Prime stable CPU overclock on the DS3 was 501 FSB x 7 = 3.5GHz, but nothing higher. Link (Sidenote, active NB cooling required) Dropping the CPU to a 6 multipler got the FSB over ~540FSB stable, but the board would finally throw in the towel a bit above that. Top OC required 1.475vCore to remain stable, compared to the 1.4375vCore my P35-DQ6 requires at the same exact overclock. It will also continue to overclock my E6300 to 3.8Ghz, but 540FSB is the absolute FSB ceiling of the P35-DQ6 at any CPU setting.

Comment from MakubeX @ 2007/07/30

The best thing is that the DS3 is dirt chap compared to other 695p OCing boards. However, at time I wouldn't get a 965p board, I would save up for a good P35, like the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R or DS3P. Still reasonably cheap and are also very good overclockers; plus you got support for Penryn.

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