Intel P965: Mid-Range Performance Sector Roundup
by Gary Key on October 20, 2006 9:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
We have to say that our P965 roundup has taken a lot longer than expected and is certainly one of largest and most comprehensive motherboard articles that we have generated this past year. The reasons for the delays are numerous but the end is finally in sight as over the course of the next ten days we will present results on more than a dozen P965 motherboards in three different categories.
It seemed like every time we were nearing completion on the article another motherboard would arrive for testing or at the very least another BIOS would arrive that promised to fix all issues and save the world at the same time. Call us suckers, but we tested every one and looking at the front page news today none of them saved the world but some of them saved a harsh opinion of the board. Since we started our testing seven weeks ago the size of the article has gone from seven to thirteen, maybe fifteen boards now as two exclusives just arrived in the labs today. We promise no more delays but maybe just maybe with some decent coffee and a trouble free BIOS we can get these two boards into the review.
In the time since we started this article we have tested forty three different BIOS releases and have provided numerous reports back to the motherboard manufacturers. Some have listened, some have not, and a couple did not need any real feedback as they got it almost right the first time. Those are the boards that we really liked and our comments will probably reflect that simple fact. We have fielded hundreds of questions from our readers and in the process we hopefully assisted enough so that the egg patrol will not need to be stationed at the front of the office for anyone upset about the delay in the article.
Even though we have a myriad of reasons both reasonable and some not about the delay in the article we have enjoyed every minute of the process. As the scope of the project grew we determined that a single article could not cover all of the motherboards in detail. It soon grew to two and now three articles. We decided to group the boards by category in order to have boards with similar features and cost compete directly against each other. We felt like this was fair to the motherboard manufacturers and would show the strengths or weaknesses of each board in its market sector. However, at the end of this roundup it comes down to which motherboard offers the best overall price, performance, support, and reliability for the user.
Our first category today has five different motherboards all situated in the midrange performance sector with pricing from $140 to $170 on average. The features on each board are all comparable and each is targeted to the same audience. That audience is typically the group of users that expects to get as much out of their motherboard and CPU as possible and are not willing to spend the additional money for the high end 975X or P965 CrossFire boards.
There are some anomalies in our categories as based upon price the MSI P965 Platinum should be in this first category but due to its features it will go up against the Asus P5B-Deluxe and Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6, which should make for an interesting shootout. These three boards and the newly arrived ECS PV1 Extreme will make up our third and final category of boards with high end features that are capable of running ATI CrossFire.
Our second category that will be published next week consists of what we consider to be the budget sector and includes boards from ECS, Foxconn, Intel, and Gigabyte. We can tell you right now that there are a couple of surprises in this group that should give the mid-range performance boards a few reasons to worry about their pricing structure.
We will recap the strengths and weaknesses of our boards at the end of each article and provide a complete analysis of all motherboards in our final article. We will determine at that time the winners and losers by category and present Editor's choice awards for the deserving. We will also present for the first time a reliability and support study on each board. Our motherboards for this roundup have at least three hundred hours of benchmark, usability , and stress testing (except for the two that arrived today) completed at this point. We feel like this study is important when considering a purchase decision and to further stir the pot, three of the five boards tested today failed the 100 hour overclocking torture test. They are being inspected by the manufacturer currently and hopefully we will have answers before our final article is published.
With all that said, let's get started and see how well our first set of boards performs today.
It seemed like every time we were nearing completion on the article another motherboard would arrive for testing or at the very least another BIOS would arrive that promised to fix all issues and save the world at the same time. Call us suckers, but we tested every one and looking at the front page news today none of them saved the world but some of them saved a harsh opinion of the board. Since we started our testing seven weeks ago the size of the article has gone from seven to thirteen, maybe fifteen boards now as two exclusives just arrived in the labs today. We promise no more delays but maybe just maybe with some decent coffee and a trouble free BIOS we can get these two boards into the review.
In the time since we started this article we have tested forty three different BIOS releases and have provided numerous reports back to the motherboard manufacturers. Some have listened, some have not, and a couple did not need any real feedback as they got it almost right the first time. Those are the boards that we really liked and our comments will probably reflect that simple fact. We have fielded hundreds of questions from our readers and in the process we hopefully assisted enough so that the egg patrol will not need to be stationed at the front of the office for anyone upset about the delay in the article.
Even though we have a myriad of reasons both reasonable and some not about the delay in the article we have enjoyed every minute of the process. As the scope of the project grew we determined that a single article could not cover all of the motherboards in detail. It soon grew to two and now three articles. We decided to group the boards by category in order to have boards with similar features and cost compete directly against each other. We felt like this was fair to the motherboard manufacturers and would show the strengths or weaknesses of each board in its market sector. However, at the end of this roundup it comes down to which motherboard offers the best overall price, performance, support, and reliability for the user.
Our first category today has five different motherboards all situated in the midrange performance sector with pricing from $140 to $170 on average. The features on each board are all comparable and each is targeted to the same audience. That audience is typically the group of users that expects to get as much out of their motherboard and CPU as possible and are not willing to spend the additional money for the high end 975X or P965 CrossFire boards.
There are some anomalies in our categories as based upon price the MSI P965 Platinum should be in this first category but due to its features it will go up against the Asus P5B-Deluxe and Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6, which should make for an interesting shootout. These three boards and the newly arrived ECS PV1 Extreme will make up our third and final category of boards with high end features that are capable of running ATI CrossFire.
Our second category that will be published next week consists of what we consider to be the budget sector and includes boards from ECS, Foxconn, Intel, and Gigabyte. We can tell you right now that there are a couple of surprises in this group that should give the mid-range performance boards a few reasons to worry about their pricing structure.
We will recap the strengths and weaknesses of our boards at the end of each article and provide a complete analysis of all motherboards in our final article. We will determine at that time the winners and losers by category and present Editor's choice awards for the deserving. We will also present for the first time a reliability and support study on each board. Our motherboards for this roundup have at least three hundred hours of benchmark, usability , and stress testing (except for the two that arrived today) completed at this point. We feel like this study is important when considering a purchase decision and to further stir the pot, three of the five boards tested today failed the 100 hour overclocking torture test. They are being inspected by the manufacturer currently and hopefully we will have answers before our final article is published.
With all that said, let's get started and see how well our first set of boards performs today.
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powchi - Monday, October 23, 2006 - link
Thanks Jarred, lopri, Aikouka for the reply.Kougar - Saturday, October 21, 2006 - link
I am rather puzzled. As best I can tell from Google, my kit of Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400 does use Micron D9s...... but I use a Gigabyte DS3 and even with the awful release F1 BIOS onwards have had no issues using them. Currently I have a stable OC of 501FSB for a 3.5ghz rating on the old F6 BIOS. Can you confirm if this kit of RAM uses D9's or not, because I am running the 800mhz RAM at 1ghz, 2 or 2.1v only, 5-5-5-15 timings, 24 hour dual Prime stable?? I have a kit of Corsair 6400c4 on the way, so I guess this will prove interesting either way.
I would also like to clarify that with the hours upon hours I spent playing around with and overclocking the DS3, I only once experienced a situation where I had to use the BIOS jumper, as I had managed to lock it into a POST/rebooting cycle. Having only used a Abit IS7 before, I can say it was a major difference I quickly noticed.
Thanks for any info, it's appreciated. And good article, by the way!
Gary Key - Saturday, October 21, 2006 - link
Are your 6400's the 6400 plain or 6400C4? There is a difference between the IC chips used.
We have one set of Micron D9 1GB that work properly in this board but they cost about $650 right now and had a beta SPD. We do not have every D9 1GB module available for testing but the 14 we have tried resulted in failure. Some would do 445, some would do 465. Just about every DS3 owner I know has an issue with the recent D9 1G modules not reaching 500FSB at 1:1 in a stable manner. We even tried three different boards during testing. I was able to hit 510 with the 512MB D9 and some beta 1GB Elpedia sticks from OCZ. Gigabyte agrees with our findings and it should be solved shortly.
We really like the DS3, it proved to be a very stable board in testing. As I stated at the end, this board has changed our opinion about Gigabyte again.
Thanks for the comments. :)
John - Sunday, October 22, 2006 - link
Gary, have you tested G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) F2-6400PHU2-2GBHZ modules on the DS3? If not please add these to your list. This is some extremely popular Micron D9 memory with favorable reviews on Newegg and our forums.Kougar - Sunday, October 22, 2006 - link
I am currently using the basic 5-5-5-12 1.9v vanilla 6400 kit, not the 6400c3 or the 6400c4. Could you please tell me which of these uses the Micron D9s, since from what you are saying I've only found incorrect info! Thanks for fully explaining this issue with the D9's in your reply, as I did not know Anandtech had tested not one or even two but three DS3's and a whopping 14 modules! So do you know if both the "c3" and "c4" use the Micron D9s, then? I've already ordered the 6400c4 kit, so I am getting the feeling I am in for a rude surprise!
I'm grateful to know that y'all are keeping ontop of the situation, this does go a long way to explaining the extremely large disparity in user results I've read or come across about the DS3. And I'm grateful Gigabyte is working to solve this issue, the user support and countless BIOS work from them is not something I was ever expecting... it's gone a long way to putting them on my top picks list.
And I believe I should be thanking you for the reply. ;)
jonp - Saturday, October 21, 2006 - link
-- on the second memory chart it always says "4/4 slots populated - 1 Dual-Channel Bank". If all four slots are populated with the same memory, why does it say "1" Dual-Channel Bank?-- I can only find the GEIL memory at one on-line merchant (via froogle or pricewatch) at $460 for 2GB. That would be $920 for 4GB! it would have been nice if you had also picked a less expensive memory that more of us could afford.
-- ASUS making a significant change to their product and only changing the version makes it VERY hard (impossible) to on-line order the specific product desired. newegg says order and if wrong, they will exchange...but that gets expensive too... and takes at least 7 days turnaround; and no guarantee that it will be the right one even then.
thanks for the article...it was, as always, full of useful data and observations.
Gary Key - Saturday, October 21, 2006 - link
1. The charts have been corrected. I stated this above but Jarred and I were editing at the same time on some pages and we did an overwrite on each other's corrections a couple of times. We learned our lesson after the Biostar section turned into the ASUS section. ;-)2. When we started this article the GEIL and G.Skill PC2-6400 that we used was in the $269~$289 range for a 2GB kit. This was far below the $500+ prices that our OCZ and Corsair memory modules had reached at that time. I am trying to create a memory table at this time as the boards were tested with everything from A-Data DDR2-533 to OCZ PC2-8000VX2. Our intentions were to use mid-range PC2-6400 memory when we started but it appears we chose some memory that is in very high demand and short supply now.
3. As I stated in the article, ASUS will probably call the 1.02G board something else. The 1.01G board is not a slacker. :)
Thank you for the comments, we appreciate them.
Aikouka - Saturday, October 21, 2006 - link
After going through about 4 or so of the motherboards and looking at their windows programs... I just gotta rant.Why in God's name must motherboard manufacturers make their programs SO UGLY? I'm no Martha Stewart, but even I can see that those programs are attrocious to look at and I actually don't install those cheesy programs because of how horrible they look. I prefer a normal streamlined windows look to my programs, hence why I use the Windows Classic theme. But even if your preference isn't a normal streamlined windows look, I don't see how anyone could find those horrid looking things called applications desirable.
Nakazato - Saturday, October 21, 2006 - link
it's Taiwanese tradition. For the people above... the S3 does not overclock as well as the DS3, it's very noticable. The DQ6 is in theory better than the DS3, but may hardly be noticable and when it is, it's probably just luck of the draw.My only criticism of the review is that only one memory module type was used and that I know other reviews on AT have included some other comparisons... but your review is more recent with more of the facts in(so more relevant). I know you had some references in the article and I know that the Micron chips are the best on average, but on occasion some chips perform better on a per board basis and not just on a per chipset basis.
Review does get 2 thumbs up from me though. The extra side information(EAX2 Support of onboard sound drivers, Micron D9 chips not fully supported, but will be, etc) helps make buying decisions. Thanks for the article!
Aikouka - Sunday, October 22, 2006 - link
Gah, how can such an ugly thing be tradition. It honestly detracts from the overall computing experience having something so tastelessly crafted. I guess to each his own :/