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Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6 Mainboard Review   - Conclusion
Bluetooth 23 Sep 2007

 Pricing of
Gigabyte P35-DQ6

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Conclusion

There are no doubts that the Gigabyte Quad series of boards are impressive boards that stunned the DIY community. GA-X38-DQ6 is the newest member and it has brought the same quality standards you have seen on other boards like the P35-DQ6 or P35T-DQ6. Similar to the GA-P35-DQ6, the board comes with all the necessary expansion ports like eSATA, USB, 1394. The most important difference is the native support of Dual PCIe x16 for CrossFire.

As you have read through the pages of benchmarks pior to this page, we can see that the CrossFire performance improved by at least 2-14% depending on the benchmark test used when compared to the P35 based GA-P35T-DQ6 mainboard. We would expect a bigger improvement if a pair of higher end graphics card is used in the test of CrossFire (dual 4x) vs CrossFire (dual 16x).

This board has amazing options for overclocking. Adjustments of the CPUCLK, ASync settings, ram timing adjustments, voltage adjustments (see gallery for options). If you do not wish to meddle with BIOS settings, you can use the Easytune to do it within Windows.

In the past week, we saw a review that claim that GA-X38-DQ6 retail board is not as overclockable as the P35 series. Well, I wonder how they can come to that conclusion. Another claim on the review was that CrossFire at Dual 16x turned out to be slower than a p35 in dual PCIe x4. I am surprise with those results.

In our test, we have shown that the CrossFire performance did improve. The exception is the demo Lost Planet which show no improvement in CrossFire while the P35T-DQ6 registered an almost 100% jump in performance. I suppose Catalyst 7.9 might have some issues with it's CrossFire support for this game on X38 chipset.

In terms of Overclocking, we are able to run the board as high as 6x630MHz or 7x510MHz without any issues. In the o/c test, the DDR is raised by +0.3v, CPU Volt is raised to 1.45V, The rest PCIe, FSB, MCH is raised by +0.1v. The tests are done ona E6300.

In conclusion, this board is something that many are looking forward to. Full native PCIe Dual 16X. It is a pity that Gigabyte did not come out with a 4 PCIe full length slots, that wouldn't it be interesting to see if the board supports Quad and Tri CrossFire if there are more PCIe slots available on board. Definitely a YES.


 Pricing

 

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Pros

  • 1394
  • eSATA2
  • GbE
  • Native dual 16x CrossFire support
  • Good Overclocking options

Cons

 

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10.

 Category

Score
 Performance

10 / 10
 Features

10 / 10
 Ease Of Installation

9 / 10
 Overclocking Features

10 / 10
 Documentation

8 / 10
 Packaging

9 / 10
 Cost / Performance

7 / 10
 Overall Rating :

9 / 10

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