Gigabyte 965P-DQ6 - The Overclockers Dream - Overclocking the DQ6

Overclocking:

This board has a good reputation as an overclocker and we got a retail board - not a hand-picked unit for testing.  We ran overclocking tests two ways.  First, we dropped the multiplier down to 6x on the CPU and started raising the front side buss.  We kept bumping up the FSB until we ran into stability.  The system started to become unstable around 370FSB so we bumped up the FSB voltage to at extra 0.15v.  At this voltage we managed to gain more FSB until things become a bit unstable again at 410FSB.  At this point we bumped up the MCH voltage to 0.10 and moved the FSB voltage up to 0.30v.  This kept us stable up to about 450MHz FSB, and we managed to even get screenshot at 460Mhz FSB.

You'll notice in the screenshot below that CPU-Z identifies the CPU as a E6200.  When we change the CPU multiplier in the BIOS, we get some pretty weird readings with CPU-Z.

High FSB - Not Stable

Now that we know how high we can get the Front Side Bus, it's time to see how high we can get the CPU.  We managed to run as high as 9x367MHz=3.3GHz, but it wasn't stable even with a CPU voltage of 1.41.  For our overclocking tests we set things at 445Mhz FSB with a multiplier of 7x.  This gave us a real CPU speed of 3.108GHz on air-cooling and has remained 100% stable over a week of 100% CPU load.

CPU-Z Main - Stable

Test System:

The MSI motherboard didn't overclock as well as the Gigabyte 965P-DQ6.  We ran stock speed tests with identical memory timings and the systems were clocked exactly the same.  For overclocking comparisons, we overclocked each motherboard to the maximum stable overclock and compared the results.

Initial Testing:

We used RightMark Audio Analyzer to see just how high quality the High Definition Audio is.  The results are pretty normal for an integrated audio solution.  It's no X-Fi, but when you plug in a set of $30 headphones I'm sure you can't hear the difference anyway.

Rightmark Audio Analyzer

We have started looking at network performance and CPU load to compare just how fast Gigabit Ethernet really is.  We've found some motherboards have incredible network throughput, while others use a lot of CPU load.  How does the 965P-DQ6 fare?  Take a look below.

The Marvel Gigabit doesn't perform like it should at all.  We find 1000base performance very weak on this board.  On a positive note, it uses very little CPU power.

On the next page we're going to jump into some synthetic benchmarks such as SiSoft Sandra, SuperPi and more.