Jetway 966PDAG-PB Budget S775 Motherboard Review

Motherboards/Intel S775 by piotke @ 2007-08-16

Building a Core 2 Duo based system is becoming more affordable by the minute, today we check out a new motherboard from Jetway based on the Intel P965 chipset and priced well below $100. Can it stand a chance against the newer P35? How high does it overclock? Find out in this review.

  • prev
  • next

BIOS + overclocking

BIOS explored

Although the Jet way is a rather budget minded board, it has a wide range of bios overclocking options. To name the most important:

  • CPU clock ratio can be changed, depending on the CPU it can go from 6x to …
  • CPU host clock, or known as the front side bus can be set from 266 Mhz up to 600 Mhz (using a 1066 Mhz fsb processor).
  • Dram clock can be set to SPD, 533 Mhz, 667 Mhz or 800 Mhz.
  • Cpu Vcore goes from 0,83125V all the way to 1,59375 Volt, in very little steps of about 0,0150 Volt. Besides that you can also activate the option CPU Vcore 7-shift, which allows you to add an extra +50mV, just up to +350 mV.
  • North bridge (P965) chipset voltage can be set from 1,16V to 1,62 volt in steps of about 0,03 volt.
  • DDR2 memory voltage starts at 1,73V and can be set to 2,43 V insteps of 0,04 Volt. Keep in mind that 2,43 VDDR2 is actually very high.


Madshrimps (c) Madshrimps (c)
Monitoring screen & general overview


Madshrimps (c) Madshrimps (c)
FSB & Ram settings


Madshrimps (c) Madshrimps (c) Madshrimps (c)
Madshrimps (c) Madshrimps (c) Madshrimps (c)
Main voltage settings


Madshrimps (c)
Memory settings + timings


Overclocking

With all this settings you might expect a straight boot to 400 Mhz FSB. Unfortunately the Bios is very picky when you change a little thing. Change too many setting such as voltages and clock speeds at once and the board refuses to boot. You must change most settings one by one, and don’t take too high FSB steps, or you’ll be having the same non-boot problem. Once the settings have proven themselves stable the board will run 24/7 and let you reboot and do cold boots with any hassle.

After a Cmos clear you’ll experience the problem again, even if you have some settings that have proven to be stable, you’ll still have to set them one by one and in small steps.

Using a 2 Gig Kit of OCZ DDR2 pc7200 (with Micron D9 chips), I could reach a max FSB of about 380-385Mhz. Not bad for a budget board. And I didn’t bother further testing, as nor memory, nor CPU were limiting factor. The CPU has proven to operate at over 500 fsb and the memory did close to 600 Mhz…. A bit later, I tested the mainboard with another kit of OCZ, a 1 Gig PC6400 set. Nothing fancy. And suddenly the board reached up to 400-405 Mhz. I retested with the 2 gig kit, but that limited me to 385 Mhz.

Madshrimps (c)


Madshrimps (c)
click thumb for zoom


On to the first tests ->
  • prev
  • next
Comment from Sidney @ 2007/08/16
Decent board for the price; everything seems a bargain lately

 

reply