The P965 chipset has certainly evoked a lot of different emotions around our test labs as well as around the various hardware sites and forums. This chipset was hyped as the next 440BX in some circles and promoted ad nauseam before, during, and after Computex last year. At first look this chipset seemed to be an instant replacement for the venerable 975X as it costs less, sports an improved memory controller (at least on paper), and supports all Intel processors from NetBurst (Celeron through Pentium D) to Core 2 Duo, as well as the latest Core 2 Quad offerings.

Leading up to Computex 2006 we found that the majority of the motherboard suppliers were introducing at least one product based on this new chipset, while companies like Gigabyte and ASUS would launch several different product lines dedicated to it. The initial product introductions had this chipset being used in every imaginable configuration from the $80 ECS P965T-A to the $250 (at launch) ASUS P5B-Deluxe WiFi-AP. While the high-end boards like the Gigabyte GA-P965-DQ6 and ASUS P5B-Deluxe have dropped in price, the base P965 boards such as the ECS P965T-A and MSI P965 Neo-F continue to hover around the $80 mark.

At times we have even seen these budget P965 boards practically given away for free with the purchase of a processor, but other chipsets continue to thrive in the low end market for people wanting to use a Core 2 Duo processor. In fact, one of our favorite motherboards after the Conroe launch was the ASRock 775Dual-VSTA featuring the VIA PT880 Pro chipset that afforded users the capability to utilize their existing AGP or DDR memory with a Core 2 Duo processor. We still recommend this board and its successor the 4CoreDual-VSTA that features quad core capability and improved performance in the budget Intel market.

Why hasn't the P965 obliterated the other chipsets in the market sector? Obviously one important factor is pricing as it appears there will not be any $60 P965 boards soon (or perhaps ever). That leaves the budget market to Intel's previous generation chipsets and competitors like VIA or SIS. Unfortunately, with the AMD buyout of ATI we will not see competitive chipsets from ATI in the Core 2 Duo market except for the performance oriented RD600 that is currently being offered from DFI. We also see very good 975X boards such as the DFI Infinity and Intel D975XBX2 in the $160 to $199 range now that offer excellent performance for the price.

The other important factor is performance, as Intel's 975X still offers better clock for clock performance when compared to the P965 in most situations. We expect this to change to some degree as the P965 continues to mature, and additional BIOS tweaks such as 1T command rates should be fully working in the near future. The 975X's front side bus will not overclock as high as the P965, but due to relaxed MCH timings and memory strap changes it is difficult to take advantage of the higher P965 front side bus speeds without premium memory and cooling solutions.

The 975X also offers 8x8 CrossFire capability while the P965 has been limited to a 16x4 hybrid solution. We have not discovered much difference in performance at the lower resolutions, but as game engines and future video cards require greater bandwidth then the P965's CrossFire performance will be hampered. The good news is that the upcoming release of the Bearlake chipset family will feature a performance oriented version with true dual x16 capability. We might even see a few upcoming P965 motherboards offer a revised PCIe controller chip that allows 8x8x4 or 16x0x4 operation with CrossFire performance exceeding that of 975X in 8x8 mode.

Probably the most important factor to date has been compatibility. The initial P965 BIOS releases suffered from memory timing and voltage issues, and there were also general performance drawbacks in the areas of overclocking and memory throughput. The majority of these issues have been solved as the BIOS and motherboard designs have matured. The memory suppliers have also worked closely with the motherboard suppliers to ensure the issues we witnessed at launch with memory modules not booting at 1.8V or having SPD settings that greatly affected timings are basically a thing of the past.

However, the one item that still concerns us and continues to be an almost daily issue in both our labs and those systems owned by the readers is drive compatibility. Intel did just about everything right last year, but the one boneheaded decision they made was to introduce the P965/G965 chipsets without native IDE support. While we agree the IDE interface is getting long in the tooth and SATA is the solution for the foreseeable future, it would have been nice to have coordinated this decision with the optical drive manufacturers. Hindsight is always 20-20, but the best solution would have been to defer the change until the next chipset release, as it appears the optical drive suppliers will have primarily switched to the SATA interface by Q3 of this year, just in time for Bearlake.

In the meantime we have been left with a situation where the motherboard manufacturers had to increase the cost of their boards in order to include an additional IDE capable chipset, and with this they opened a can of worms. The additional complexity involved in getting a chipset like the JMicron JMB363 to play nice with Intel ICH8/R chipsets has proved to be difficult. While Biostar wisely chose the VIA VT6410 chipset for IDE availability at the expense of additional SATA ports, the balance of suppliers have gone the JMicron route. We feel like this is to gain an advantage on the feature checklist as you can have two additional SATA ports for either standard 3Gb/s or e-SATA support.

The auxiliary IDE and SATA support has come at an expense. There have been numerous problems getting the IDE drives to operate in modes other than PIO. There have been conflicts between the RAID operation on the JMicron and Intel ICH8R setups. The ability to use IDE optical drives and SATA drives together on the JMicron controller has caused problems numerous times. Even purchasing a SATA optical drive and using it on the Intel ICH8R controller with RAID enabled has been impossible on some boards. One of the most popular scenarios we witnessed and continue to see is to have RAID enabled on the Intel controller and IDE on the JMicron resulting in the RAID array not being seen. The other problem is enabling RAID on the JMicron setup and not being able to use an IDE drive or RAID on the Intel controller. The majority of these problems have been resolved through BIOS, firmware, or driver updates, but you just never know when it is going to be an issue.

With all that said, let's present a quick recap of our review boards and a few boards that stood out during the past four months of testing.



Test Setup and Benchmarks

Our selection of motherboards fully supports the current range of socket 775 Intel processors. We chose an E6300 for testing as we feel this will be a very popular Core 2 Duo CPU choice with the P965 motherboards.

Standard Test Bed Performance Test Configuration
Processor:	Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 Dual Core, 1.86GHz, 2MB Unified Cache 1066FSB, 7x Multiplier
RAM:	GeIL PC2-6400 800MHz Plus (2x1GB - GX22GB6400PDC) (Micron Memory Chips)
Hard Drive:	Seagate 320GB 7200RPM SATA2 16MB Buffer
System Platform Drivers:	Intel - 8.1.1.1010
Video Cards:	1 x MSI X1950XTX
Video Drivers:	ATI Catalyst 6.11
CPU Cooling:	Scythe Infinity
Power Supply:	OCZ GameXStream 700W
Optical Drive:	Sony 18X AW-Q170A-B2
Case:	Cooler Master CM Stacker 830
Operating System:	Windows XP Professional SP2
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A 2GB memory configuration is now standard in the AT test bed as most enthusiasts are currently purchasing this amount of memory. Our choice of DDR2-800 memory from GeIL offered a very wide range of memory settings during our stock and overclocked test runs. Our memory timings are set based upon determining the best memory bandwidth via our test application results.

We are utilizing the MSI X1950XTX video card to ensure our 1280x1024 resolutions are not completely GPU bound for our motherboard test results. We did find in testing that applying a 4xAA/8xAF setting in most of today's latest games created a situation where the performance of the system starts becoming GPU limited. Our video tests are run at 1280x1024 resolution for this recap article at standard settings.

Synthetic and Application Performance

We are presenting an abbreviated test suite to quickly recap the performance of our review group and to show the impact of the overclocking improvements upon memory performance, general applications, and a couple of games. We will utilize SiSoft Sandra 2007 for the Buffered and Unbuffered memory scores; SuperPi 1.5 1M, Nero Recode 2 utilizing Office Space DVD conversion, and WinRAR 3.61 along with our custom 602MB directory test for general reference scores. Full test results can be found in our P965 motherboard or Core 2 Duo buyer's guide articles.

Our Quake game benchmark utilizes the IdNetDemo demo recording. This includes mainly outdoor areas with numerous players trying to eliminate each other. We tested the game with High Quality settings (uncompressed normal maps), and we enabled all the advanced graphics options except for VSync. This game is sensitive to memory latency changes and is a good indicator of how memory settings can affect the performance of certain games.

Our Battlefield 2 benchmark utilizes our in-house recording based on the 1.3 release. This recording includes numerous players and vehicles battling it out on the Daqing Oilfield map. We tested the game with High Quality settings enabled. We have found this game to be sensitive to both CPU and GPU changes. Since our GPU remains constant we will see the effects of our FSB overclocking along with memory latency changes on the final score.

Click to enlarge

At stock speeds the Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 motherboard posts the best Sandra Unbuffered scores and claims the top Nero Recode, WinRAR, and Battlefield 2 scores; it also remains near the top of the categories. The MSI P965 Platinum had the top Quake 4 score while the ASUS P5B-Deluxe WiFi Edition takes the top Sandra Buffered score and the Biostar T-Force P965 Deluxe finishes with the best SuperPI 1M score. Honestly, all of the scores are so close that you would need specific benchmarks to differentiate the boards in daily use.

At stock speeds, any board choice out of this group would be fine for daily use. In subjective terms after testing each board at least 300 hours and in general use we found the Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 and MSI P965 Platinum boards seemed to "feel" the fastest and had a general snappy behavior with most applications. The ASUS P5B-Deluxe WiFi-AP had the best overall features and after the latest BIOS and sound card driver updates was a board that we used continuously in both gaming and general application work when not testing.

The Biostar TForce 965PT was the surprise of the group from both a performance and cost viewpoint. After the latest BIOS update we found most of the quirky 4:5 memory ratio issues that limited overclocking have been resolved although at times we still ran into problems. It seems as if at one point or another each of our boards has had problems with 4:5 memory ratios (or continues to have them), especially during overclocking. We are starting to wonder if this is just a BIOS tuning issue or if it goes deeper. We will have to see how well the next generation of P965 boards handles this memory ratio in testing.

Click to enlarge

In our overclocking tests the ASUS P5B-Deluxe WiFi-AP was absolutely superb and clearly offers the best overall performance. In additional testing we have taken our sample up to 545FSB while retaining perfect stability. With the latest BIOS releases we found our Gigabyte DQ6 and DS3 boards were both able to reach or exceed the 500FSB level with our Micron D9 based memory while also providing very good stability, at the expense of slightly looser MCH and memory timings.

We just recently received another BIOS update for the Gigabyte GA-965P-S3 that resulted in a final 7x485 overclock. Once again the surprise of the group was the Biostar 965PT as it had exceptional overclocking capabilities for its $105 price tag. We did not expect the ECS boards to overclock very well as this has not been one of their fortes, but we also did not expect them to use the word "Extreme" on the PX1 board to indicate a level of performance that the board not meet. The Foxconn board certainly looked the part and had the right components and BIOS options, but could not live up to its outward appearance - although in the end we found its performance was on-par with its sub $100 price.

The biggest disappointment in the overclocking area was that of the MSI P965 Platinum. We expected a lot from this board in the overclocking arena and it did not deliver, not yet at least. The stock performance was superb and we did reach a 7x415 setting, but due to the memory strap change at 400FSB we found the performance in most instances did not improve upon our reported 7x375 scores. We have a new BIOS to try that should allow 450FSB overclocking and with a price tag of $135 or less, the MSI might yet be the board to have in this price range.



Summarization and Support

After numerous reviews, thousands of hours of testing, and reams of collected information we can safely say that an Intel P965 is still an Intel P965 no matter which motherboard you place it in. This is not a real surprise with each manufacturer utilizing the same basic chipset and BIOS code from Intel. What has made a difference since the P965 chipset launched is the ability of each supplier to customize the BIOS code as well as the option to offer a bevy of features at each price point. The current boards that are shipping now are fairly mature and most of the lessons learned regarding layout designs, component choices, or user enhancements are being implemented in the next generation of P965 motherboards. We only have to look at the difference between the abit AB9 Pro and the new AB9 QuadGT to understand how manufacturers are addressing their short comings.

We do not believe the overall performance of the next wave of P965 motherboards will improve drastically over the current boards, although we do expect to see incremental improvements in memory and overclocking performance as the BIOS engineers have had time to learn the intricacies of the chipset. This generally happens to every chipset family over time but we are excited about 1T capability above DDR2-800 and potentially 8x8 operation for CrossFire for improved performance over the 975X chipset.

While we believe performance is still extremely important, it is no longer the only reason to consider a particular motherboard supplier. In our opinion, the features, price, warranty, support, and reliability of the motherboard should be first on your list as stock performance will generally be nearly equal among all motherboards based on the same chipset. To a lesser degree even the performance variations between different chipsets for the same CPU family are negligible. It comes back to features and support for making that final decision.

We would love to recommend and present an award to every motherboard. Depending upon your situation any of these motherboards will work perfectly fine as a home office or casual gaming board, and most will do so with few if any issues. However, there are a few motherboards that just did the job better or had support teams that swayed our opinion. We are still finalizing our supplier support article, as the NVIDIA launch of the 680i and 650i products threw us for a twist and have led us down a different path in some cases when looking at overall product support. In the meantime, here's a quick summary of the support we have seen thus far.

We received varying support from each supplier and not in a way you would think. Our direct support was excellent but we wanted to find out how well the manufacturer supported a retail customer so we acted like one. We logged on to their support forums if available and asked questions about our issues or those of other users. We purchased retail boards and called technical support. We emailed, faxed, or otherwise bugged the hell out some customer support personnel for the last six weeks. We will provide more detailed results in a separate article, but these results did help to determine our Editor's Choice awards. After all, it's not just about performance anymore.

We believe that Gigabyte has made the greatest progress in product implementation, execution, and support since we first reviewed the P965 products in July. The GA-965P-DS3 and GA-965P-DQ6 were products that we strongly criticized for not living up to their potential, and over the course of time Gigabyte showed true concern about resolving customer issues. They worked diligently at resolving the Micron D9 issues while adding other features into their BIOS releases. We also found their technical and customer support groups to be very friendly and quick to address most of our problems - problems that we presented to these support groups as actual board owners and not as a review site. While we received very good service from Gigabyte, not all owners we have spoken with feel the same way. Every person has their own opinions and expectations about what support means and how a product should work. One thing holds true for every supplier, however: none of them are perfect and none of the products we have reviewed are perfect either.

ASUS is one of the best design and feature innovators in our group and consistently had a product in just about every price category that had top performance results. They continually improve their products and address issues (at least to a certain degree). The next series of P965 motherboards featuring the Commando and Vista Edition products have already shown great promise in both performance and feature sets. The P5B-Deluxe WiFi-AP was the first P965 motherboard we looked at and it continues to be the standard that other P965 motherboards are judged by. ASUS technical support was very good most of the time, but there were times we did not receive an answer or reply quickly. The ASUS forums provided very good feedback but at times it was from other users and not the technical service personnel. Several ASUS owners felt the same way and it seemed as if the technical support on certain boards was excellent while on others it was not. Opinions from users about ASUS support would typically elicit very strong opinions that were almost always positive or negative, with very little being in the middle.

Technical and customer support provided by Biostar and Foxconn was very good, although we have to admit that Biostar was one company that we rarely contacted. The products after the initial BIOS updates were just superb considering the market they targeted and the minor amount of issues we experienced. Foxconn had very good support for the product we inquired about but once again except for a storage drive issue while overclocking we did not really have that many discussions with them. BIOS updates from both companies seemed to address the majority of the reported problems from us and other customers. Our experience seemed to fall into line with the customers we spoke with, although several support request answers were slow in coming.

abit has an excellent support forum and customer service personnel that followed up quickly on our issues. Although we are still seeing new product release issues, their recent track record indicates those same issues will be resolved. abit owners seemed to very vocal about receiving good support although most admitted it sometimes takes too long for a BIOS update to correct issues. We found that abit does listen to their customers and we already see product improvements in their series of P965 motherboards, but we still have some quality assurance concerns in final testing of the BIOS and software features. Except for the JMicron controller issues, the other major issues we reported on in our AB9 QuadGT preview have been solved as of today.

MSI also provided very good technical support and customer service when utilizing their request forms, but the answers we received were a little late in our opinion, and in one case we received a canned response that didn't really address our problem. The MSI forum support was excellent and the community was very helpful when describing various issues. We would feel very comfortable recommending a MSI product based upon our experiences. That leaves ECS and their Support Form system. It was hit or miss on the answers we received if we received them, indicating they have some knowledgeable support personnel but also some people that don't really know what they're talking about. Depending on who answers your support request, you may get a quick resolution to your problem or you may end up very frustrated.

We will provide further details in the near future, but it is now time to look at the motherboards that we believe offered the best overall user experience in our testing. We are looking at all aspects of each board, with the support we received definitely playing a large role. We have to be blunt about one subject. None of the boards are perfect or even near perfect when compared to more mature solutions like the 975X or even Socket 939/AM2 products, but in our opinion each board we felt deserving of an award had strengths that greatly outweighed their weaknesses.



Award Ceremonies

Overall, the Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 performed the best in our benchmarks when not overclocked. This is an accomplishment and shows a level of consistency and fine tuning that was not usually matched by the other suppliers. The ASUS P5B-E competes directly against the DS3 and offers a similar level of performance and additional features like IEEE 1394 support. Considering the almost $20 difference in price we think the DS3 is the better value in the mid-range sector.

The overclocking capability of the ASUS P5B-Deluxe WiFi-AP was very impressive considering our E6300 retail unit is not exactly the best CPU in the labs when it comes to overclocking. If you are looking to get the highest possible overclocking results with an E6300 or E6400 processor then we would recommend the ASUS P5B-Deluxe at this time. Of course our preliminary results (which will be available shortly) with the Commando board will change this statement.

The Biostar TForce 965PT offered excellent overclocking ability for the price and proved to us that there is hope for an "inexpensive" Intel chipset based motherboard that can provide excellent performance and overclocking capability in a single package for the money. The Gigabyte GA-965P-S3 is basically the DS3 sans the 100% use of Conductive Polymer Aluminum Solid Capacitors on the board. With the latest BIOS release we found this board to offer overclocking performance near the Biostar board for about $10 more.

The Foxconn P9657AA-8KS2H offered very good stock performance with some overclocking capability for less than $100. The overall quality of the Foxconn P9657AA-8KS2H was excellent and certainly equaled that of boards that cost significantly more. We also found the Foxconn board offered the best performance, quality, and stability of the under $100 products. The ECS P965T-A and MSI P965 Neo-F are basic yet solid P965 budget motherboards now, but we feel like the Foxconn is the better board overall for just a few more dollars.

In terms of features, we really liked the mid-range ASUS and abit boards as they provided just about every possible option on a motherboard in this price range that one could want. While the mid-range Gigabyte and Biostar boards are also feature rich, they both lack Firewire support, something that should be a given on boards in this price range. We have to give Biostar a gold star for overall layout design on their TForce boards, although the locations of the 24-pin and 4-pin ATX power connectors are a minor detraction.

The ASUS P5B-E and Gigabyte DS3/S3 motherboards have fairly standard layouts that we could live with on a daily basis, but we have to wonder what the layout design group at abit was thinking when they placed the IDE and two SATA connectors between the PCI Express x1 and PCI slots on the AB9 Pro. We will call it a creative design inspiration at this time to be nice as we still like the boards capability since the 1.5 BIOS update.

The Analog Devices AD1988A/B HD Audio Codecs used on the ASUS boards really put the screws to the Realtek ALC-88x series of HD Audio Codecs in our EAX 2 gaming tests. The EAX sounds were clear and concise unlike some of the warbling and muddy sound generated by the Realtek codecs in our Battlefield 2 and F.E.A.R. tests. While the audio quality of both codecs was almost equal in our standard game, DVD video, and audio tests we still think the ADI had the superior overall audio quality. Let's take a look at our winners now.

AnandTech presents the Gold Editors Choice for Best P965 Motherboard to the ASUS P5B-Deluxe WiFi-AP. Their 8-phase design with completely passive cooling worked very well throughout our testing regimen. The end result is an exceptionally stable motherboard and the best overclocker among the P965 motherboards. ASUS clearly listened to the computer enthusiast when they designed this motherboard, and they provided options in the BIOS that cater to this market. ASUS also utilized the ADI 1988B HD audio solution that provided the best overall audio capability and performance of the onboard solutions. The performance results from the board were consistently near or at the top and the board never once failed or put us in a situation where the product needed to be returned. However, all is not perfect as it took several BIOS releases and a new audio driver to solve some feedback and recording issues not present on other ASUS ADI equipped boards, and some users are still reporting problems. ASUS also continues to have issues with Vdroop exceeding that of other board manufacturers when overclocking, but how much that really matters is clearly debatable depending upon your overclocking objectives. Overall, the positives of the board greatly outweigh the negatives, and while we have expressed concern to ASUS about a few issues, this remains our favorite current P965 board.

AnandTech is pleased to present our Silver Editor's Choice for Best P965 Motherboard to Gigabyte for their innovative GA-965P-DS3. Gigabyte has made a tremendous comeback in the last year when it comes to product design, reliability, and customer support. This particular motherboard completely changed our perception of Gigabyte and was a motherboard that we felt best represented the spirit of the P965 chipset. One feature that Gigabyte introduced on this motherboard that is now in widespread utilization by other suppliers is the 100% use of Conductive Polymer Aluminum Solid Capacitors. We complained bitterly to Gigabyte for weeks about the inability of this board to overclock past the 450FSB level when utilizing Micron D9 memory, and their engineering group responded with several BIOS releases with the latest now allowing the board to reach 500FSB levels. Gigabyte has recently introduced a revision two board that improves upon the original release and adds improved electricals for better Quad Core compatibility, a new heatsink design for improved cooling, and it is now Vista Premium certified. We still wish Gigabyte would have included IEEE 1394 support, more fan headers, and a new color scheme, but otherwise this board is about as solid as they come (now).

The AnandTech Bronze Award for Best P965 Motherboard goes jointly to the Biostar TForce 965PT and the Foxconn P9657AA- 8KS2H. Both boards provided outstanding value and quality in a price range that most P965 based motherboards cannot meet. The Biostar 965PT is the best example of a budget P965 product, an outstanding overclocker for the price, high quality components, and a board that delivers what it promises. The Foxconn board delivers a high quality motherboard at an affordable price that still amazes us when compared to the other sub-$100 P965 boards. The feature set and layout is very good and we found the board to be rock solid during several weeks of testing along with very good technical support from Foxconn.

Our Editors Choice recipients are those we believe to offer the best performance, support, or value of the current P965 offerings. We congratulate ASUS, Gigabyte, Foxconn, and Biostar for their outstanding products that received our awards for Best P965 Motherboards. We would like to give an honorable mention to the MSI P965 Platinum as its performance and price are excellent. We believe this motherboard is only a revised BIOS away from receiving an award. We were also impressed with the Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 after the last BIOS updates but felt the ASUS P5B-Deluxe offered a better platform for the same price.

There are several new P965 motherboards scheduled for release over the coming weeks and we will take an in-depth look at each one. As abit has already shown, the various manufacturers still have a few tricks up their sleeves when it comes to designing a motherboard based around this chipset.

We're happy to report that looking at the big picture, there was not a real loser in this group. Each board has its strengths and weaknesses so it comes down what the individual user wants, be it price, overclocking, features, and/or support. The boards that received awards are our top picks, but availability - particularly in other countries - can be a problem. There are also boards such as the ASUS P5B-E Plus and Gigabyte GA-965P-DS4 that would certainly be considered for an award but are only available in certain localized markets.

On a final note, while we're quite pleased with the majority of the P965 boards now, the P965 launch left a lot to be desired, and we really don't like to see such a rocky launch of an otherwise good product. Perhaps it's simply the natural consequence of the price wars and intense competition between AMD and Intel, but if so we would rather see companies take an extra couple of weeks (or months) to iron out the problems rather than letting the customers do the final beta testing.