We're big fans of the Core 2 Duo E6300 here, so it's no surprise that it's the CPU we started with. It runs at a modest 1.86GHz, with 2MB of shared L2 between the cores (Allendale core). The particular one we used is a B2 stepping SL9SA Core 2 E6300 manufactured in Malaysia. The memory we used, graciously provided by Crucial, is Crucial's Ballistix PC2-8000. We installed two 1GB DIMM's in our machine, naturally in dual channel mode. This memory is fairly aggressive timing wise, supporting timings of 5-5-5-15 @ 1000mhz DDR.

Heatsink wise, we could have gone with Intel's stock heatsink. The heatsink Intel includes in their retail box is actually pretty sizeable. Still, since we knew we were going to overclock the crap out of the Core 2 in this board if we could, we opted for a little better cooling solution.

The Artic Cooling Freezer7 Pro is a rather modestly priced (at around $30) 6-heatpipe design that cools well, and is generally well regarded. It's rather tall, and uses a lightweight 120mm fan blowing through the radiant area towards the rear of the case. Installation is identical to Intel's retail boxed sink, so there's no major drama with installation either.

Beyond the above points of interest, we proceeded to build a complete system, based on the following components.

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 1.86GHz CPU
• Two - 1GB DIMM's of DDR-2 PC2-8000 Crucial Ballistix Memory.
• Seagate ST3120026AS 120GB SATA Drive
• Liteon 160P6S 16x DVD/RW Drive
• Sapphire Radeon X850XT 256MB PCI-E Video Card
• Airnet APS500 500W Power Supply
• Rosewill R6A34BK ATX Midtower case

Beyond installing all the relevant drivers from Gigabyte's Driver CD, we installed:

• Windows XP Pro SP2
• Omega ATI Driver 3.8.291 (more on why later)
• S&M Burnin
• HeavyLoad v2.1
• 3DMark 2005
• 3DMark 2006
• Cinebench 9.5
• CPU-Z v1.37
• Divx Encoder 6.21
• Everest Ultimate Edition v3.01.652
• Fraps v2.7.4
• Prime95 v2.414
• PCMark05 v1.10
• Sisoft Sandra 2007 SP1
• Winlame Prerelease4 for Win32
• Half Life 2

Going forward at FastSilicon.com, you'll see this list of software becoming very familiar, as it forms the basis of our current testing methodology. We also flashed the mainboard to the latest BIOS revision available from Gigabyte's website, revision R6.

Suffice to say, installation of the hardware and the operating system and software itself, at least at stock clockrates, went without incident and it took us no time at all to be greeted with a smooth running Windows XP environment. Though not enough to go jumping up and down for joy about, I was quite impressed with Realtek's HD audio. With available environmental audio capabilities, a 10 band EQ, auto sensing jacks, and crystal clear sound, it's becoming less and and less a desire of mine to go out and buy a sound card these days.

From the below pictures you see CPU-Z telling us what's going on with this CPU at it's stock clock rate. Notice however the memory timings when running the memory at BIOS default clock of 800MHz. No worries you say, we can just go into the BIOS and tighten things up, like you can on any board these days right? Well, remember in the intro, where I mentioned some head scratching? Let's take a quick peek at the BIOS.

We're not going to waste 20 screens boring you to tears showing you every BIOS page you've already likely seen a million times, we're going to focus on the important stuff here. Thankfully, utilizing a standard Award BIOS, all the important stuff is located in one section called MB Intelligent Tweaker. I'm honestly not sure if intelligence was involved in the process of making this BIOS however. Looking through here, there are a lot of good things going on. You have multiplier adjustments, fine control over the FSB in 1MHz increments, control over PCI Express frequency, memory multipliers, and fine control over voltages for quite literally everything. Then you have the Robust Graphics Booster, which isn't documented (it's a new feature of the R6 revision BIOS). I assume this is for slightly overclocking the PCI-E bus or perhaps slightly overclocking a video card itself. Regardless, it's not only unexplained, it's also not able to be turned off. Whether this led to some issues I had with ATI's Catalyst 6.9 drivers, such as TV Out use causing both screens to go black or not (which is what led me to install Omega Drivers instead) remains a mystery.

Notice anything missing? In the past, basic no frills motherboards rarely if ever had such finely grained controls over voltages and clockspeeds as this board. But even among the cheapest of the cheap, you always had at least basic controls over DRAM timings. Here you will find NONE, and I mean NONE. If you compare this board to Gigabyte's own DS3 edition, the only BIOS difference between the two boards is this one lacking dram adjustments. For all intents and purposes (apart from the DS3 using all solid state capacitors), there is basically no difference between these boards apart from the missing BIOS adjustments for dram timings.

I know Gigabyte wants to differentiate the GA-965P-S3 from some of it's higher end (and extremely similar) boards. But this was a really stupid way to go about it. Maybe Gigabyte's BIOS engineers were suffering from poor lab ventilation, because something had to be in the air making them too intoxicated to think clearly, for having done the BIOS this way.

It's not all entirely gloom and doom here though. We did successfully overclock the CPU quite a bit as you'll see in the next section. It's just a shame we had to leave additional performance laying on the floor because we were at the whims of the BIOS when it came to memory timings.

Next, it's time to overclock this baby and see how well we do.