Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 is a good choice for the mainstream user building a Core 2 Duo-based system willing to achieve the best performance at the lowest price point possible. In other words, this motherboard is targeted to users that want a high-end performance but don’t want to spend a lot of money on a high-end motherboard.
This motherboard is faster than boards based on Intel 975X chipset, which is great. It also supports DDR2-1066/PC2-8500 memories and has a good overclocking potential for its market segment, features that will surely attract users wanting to pump the maximum performance possible from their systems.
It also features SPDIF optical and coaxial outputs, allowing you to connect its on-board audio to digital speakers or to your home theater receiver. Keep in mind that this motherboard has a low (for today’s standards) signal-to-noise ratio on its audio inputs (85 dB), so this board isn’t a good choice if you want to capture analog audio and edit it on your PC professionally (for this task we recommend a minimum 95 dB SNR ADC, i.e. for the inputs).
It also comes with aluminum solid electrolytic capacitors, which will prevent you from suffering from the infamous capacitor leakage problem.
Its direct competitor is ASUS P5B, which has exactly the same features, but Gigabyte model can be found a little bit cheaper – however we could achieve a higher overclocking with P5B.
The problem, however, is that MSI P965 Platinum has more features and costs the same thing as this motherboard from Gigabyte (even worse, you can get a USD 15 mail-in rebate at Newegg.com and this board from MSI will cost you only USD 120). MSI P965 Platinum uses ICH8R chip instead of the plain ICH8 used by Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 and ASUS P5B, supporting six SATA-300 ports with RAID0, 1, 10 and 5, plus one extra SATA-300 port. It also has Firewire ports and a second x16 PCI Express slot (working at x4 though), allowing you to connect a second video card for attaching three or four video monitors to your system or even to increase the 3D performance, as it supports CrossFire technology.
Even though Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 is a good product, MSI P965 Platinum offers a better cost/benefit ratio, as it provides more features for the same price. That is the only reason we are giving this motherboard our Silver award instead of our Golden award.
