Closer Look

The mainboard uses a three-phase processor voltage regular circuitry built with pretty up-to-date components. However, there are huge capacitors right next to it and later on one of them will cause us some trouble during Tuniq Tower 120 cooler installation. And here is this dramatic difference between the two boards: DS3 mainboard model doesn?t use these huge capacitors. All capacitors there are small and boast better characteristics.

The chipset North Bridge is cooled down with a massive heatsink. Unfortunately, its cooling area is not big and efficient enough, so if you raise the chipset North Bridge voltage during overclocking, it will heat up quite noticeably.

Strange as it might seem, but the heatsink on the chipset ICH8 South Bridge also gets quite hot. By the way, the South Bridge is responsible for operation of four Serial ATA channels, which connectors are of bright yellow color.

There is a strange Gigabyte SATA 2 controller that is responsible for Parallel ATA and two additional SATA channels. If you take a closer look at the drivers on the accompanying CD disc, you will discover that it is a JMicron controller, most likely JMB363, remarked by Gigabyte. JMicron controllers are more and more frequently used on mainboards these days, because Intel decided to completely give up Parallel ATA support in its chipsets.

The back panel of the mainboard looks almost ideal. The good old COM and LPT ports are there, together with the full set of contemporary connectors and ports including the coaxial and optical SPDIF.

Gigabyte GA-965P-S3 comes with a very modest accessories bundle including only the absolutely necessary items, such as HDD and FDD cables, two SATA cables, I/O shield, a CD disc with the software and drivers, a user?s manual, colorful quick installation poster in different languages and boxed cooler installation guide. As for the additional freebies, we can only mention a Gigabyte sticker. However, a small list of accessories like that is absolutely normal for a budget mainboard and hence cannot be regarded as a drawback.

All in all, the mainboard makes very good impression: the connectors are all very conveniently located and color-coded. Too bad that there are only two fan connectors. One of them will be used for the CPU cooler, and the remaining one should better be used for the additional chipset cooling. Moreover, it is not very conveniently located: right between the memory slots and the FDD connector. And where shall we plug the case fans into? So, looks like they were trying to save a few cents here, although the result is tremendous inconvenience for the end-user?/p>