Gigabyte P35-DQ6 Motherboard

This high-end gamers' board is based on the all new Intel P35/ICH9R chipset,

which allows an FSB of 1.3 GHz. This chipset has support for DDR 3 RAM, but this

board doesn't come with this featuure. The board also supports 45 nm CPUs, and

comes with 4 memory slots that support up to 8 GB DDR2 RAM. Like other boards in

its price range, this also has a heat-pipe running from North to South bridge,

for better cooling. Apart from 6 SATA II ports, it also has 2 GSATA II (Gigabyte

SATA) connectors, which support RAID 0, 1 and JBOD.

This motherboard was a good performer. We tested it with an Intel Core 2 Duo

2.6 GHz, 1 GB DDR2 RAM, and Radeon X1950 series graphics card. It gave good

performance in all the benchmarks, but the results were slightly lower than the

Asus P5K3 motherboard (also reviewed this month). In 3D Mark 05 and 06, its

scores were 12306 and 6021, respectively. In PC Mark 2005, it scored 6006

PCMarks. In Doom 3, it scored 196 fps, while in CINEBENCH 10 it clocked 3785

CB-CPU.

Bottom Line: Overall, though its scores

are slightly lower than P5K3, its lower price makes up for that, and makes it a

worthy buy.