GIGABYTE GA-965P-DS3 LGA 775 Intel P965 Express ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: Received a Revision 3.3
The issues surrounding D9 memory chips are gone. No boot problems.
Running an e6600 at stock voltage at
3.2 GHz The board cmae with BIOS rev F9. I did flash to the new F10.

Cons: The CMOS reset pegs doesn't come with a jumper block, also if you have a large video card the jumper is blocked by it. slight pain.

Overall Review: to OC this board easily:
Here is an example using a e6600 CPU.
With DDR2 800 memory at 5,5,5,15

Make sure these 6 things are DISABLED in Bios

- CPU Enhanced Halt (C1E)
- CPU Thermal Monitor 2(TM2)
- CPU EIST Function
-No-execute memory protect
-Limit CPUID Max to 3
-Virtualization Technology


- Set Voltage Control set to manual.
- bump Vcore to 1.4 < if needed

- Set Clock Multipler to 8 down from 9
- Set CPU Host Clock Control to Enabled
- Set CPU Host Frequency (MHz) to 400
- Set PCI Express Frequency(MHz) to 100
- Set System Memory Multiplier to 2.00
- Set DRAM Timing Selectable to Manual
- Set CAS Latency Time to 5
- Set DRAM RAS# to CAS# Delay to 5
- Set DRAM RAS# Precharge to 5
- Set Precharge dealy (tRAS) to 15

The CPU then boots at a very nice 3.2 GHz

Pros: Affordable compared to other 965p boards, good feature set, plenty of SATA ports. Passively cooled northbridge means no cheap squealy fan to worry about. Highly configurable bios. Initial performance results with the Core 2 Duo chip are very promising.

Cons: Only one IDE port means a max of two IDE devices unless you buy an expansion card. Only one graphics port, though that's typical of Possible RAM voltage boot issues (see other thoughts).

Overall Review: This motherboard, out of the box, will only recognize RAM that can run on 1.8 volts. If your RAM does not work at 1.8 volts, you will need to either get different RAM or borrow some that does, change the BIOS to provide more volts, and then put back in your >1.8v RAM. Hopefully a BIOS revision will fix this but I don't think you can flash the bios without already having working RAM :)