In a recent article posted here at Legion Hardware, the merits of overclocking were discussed and after having thought long and hard I came to a number of conclusions. In short, overclocking is a very worthwhile and practical means to squeezing more performance out of an existing platform without having to spend money. However, I feel many have lost sight of what made overclocking so appealing in the first place, and for the most part I was one of these people. Back in the days when overclocking was something that took place behind closed doors, it was all about taking a low-end processor and beefing it up to take on the latest and greatest AMD and Intel products.

These days it seems overclocking is more about pushing high-end hardware to the limits, rather than low-end hardware or even mid-range hardware. Manufacturers of graphics cards and motherboards are now using the idea of overclocking to help sell their high-end “expensive” hardware. In fact, the last ten or so motherboards reviewed here have been priced well over $200 US, with just one or two exceptions, which just so happened to be quite average in the overclocking department. Therefore the bargain hunters amongst us that want to overclock their Core 2 Duo E6300 for example, really need to do their research when purchasing the motherboard.

Given the E6300 costs around $180 US, it would be reasonable to spend about $150 US on a motherboard to suit. The Gigabyte 965P-DQ6 which we reviewed 6 months ago now, was a very impressive motherboard offering loads of features, excellent performance and great overclocking headroom. However at the time, $250 US made the 965P-DQ6 untouchable for most, and even today 6 months later, the board still costs around $200 US. The Gigabyte 965P-DS3 was an excellent alternative costing around 25% less. This version did sacrifice a few important features, such as the extra PCI Express x16 slot and Firewire support. However, the overclocking performance remained much the same and therefore the 965P-DS3 was a huge success.

Eventually a second revision of the highly successful 965P-DS3 motherboard followed, featuring a few minor tweaks and board alterations such as the 100% solid capacitor design. Gigabyte claims that an all solid capacitor design helps the system cope better under extreme conditions, such as overclocking. Therefore the 965P-DS3 (rev 2.0) became slightly better at what it does, making it even more attractive to buyers. Now there is an even newer version of the 965P-DS3 called the 965P-DS3P (rev 2.0). This new version features the 965P chipset with the ICH8R south bridge, meaning the 965P-DS3P features complete RAID support.

This means that the 965P-DS3P and the much more expensive 965P-DQ6, are very much the same feature wise. In fact, they are the same with the only difference being the physical board design. The 965P-DQ6 features a 12 phase power design where as the 965P-DS3P utilizes a 6 phase power design. The only other difference of course lies within the cooling design, which is quite extreme on the 965P-DQ6. The more expensive 965P-DQ6 uses an array of fins and heatpipe technology to cool the chipsets and power phase. The 965P-DS3P leaves the power phase chips naked and features a simple little heatsink on the north and south bridge chips.

Overall, the 965P-DS3P looks to be one of the best Intel P965 motherboards on the market, particularly at the price point, with a huge array of features, such as SATAII RAID, Dual BIOS, Dual PCI Express x16, 8-Channel Audio, Gigabit LAN, Solid Capacitor design, Firewire, USB 2.0 and many others. Gigabyte are also claiming that the 965P-DS3P is an overclocking enhanced motherboard, so I am obviously very keen to do some Core 2 Duo E6700 and possibly even E6300 overclocking on this motherboard.

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