Gigabyte GA-965P-DS rev 3.3 changes & quirks I noticed

The rev 3.3 DS3 I ordered from clubit.com arrived last Friday which is nearly a week ago by now. I still haven't migrated my primary system to it as I wanted to "play with it" a bit before locking into a set of configuration choices. While doing this I have noticed at least one nice change as well as some strange quirks ... for lack of a better word ... and was wondering if anyone else had noticed them and/or had any comments about them. I posted the observations below over on AnandTech and figured it wouldn't hurt to also see what feedback I might get here.

FYI, the system I'm basing the comments below on consists of
Core 2 Duo E4300
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro HSF
Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 rev 3.3 with F10 BIOS
2GB memory, Corsair DDR2-800 (XMS2 TWIN2X2048-6400)
eVGA 256-P2-N554-AX Nvidia Geforce 7600GT 256MB 128-bit GDDR3
1) Hurrah! There are (now) more than two fan headers on the motherboard!
You may laugh, but one of the "big" concerns I had about buying a DS3 was that it had only two fan headers. Thankfully, my rev 3.3 DS3 has four fan headers. There are two 4-pin fan headers labeled CPU_FAN and SYS_FAN and two 3-pin headers labeled NB_FAN and PWR_FAN. (BTW, does anyone out there know what the heck PWR_FAN might refer to? All I can come up with is "Power Fan" but that makes no sense to me).

Quirk: While the NB_FAN is a 3-pin fan header there seems to be no way to detect the RPM's from it. All I have seen listed in the BIOS ... or detected by Speedfan ... were the speeds for the CPU_FAN, SYS_FAN, and PWR_FAN. Weird omission, no?

2) Extra fan headers are good because you will definitely want to put a fan on that Northbridge!
While I haven't measured the temperature, I have noticed that without a fan on it my Northbridge becomes so hot that I cannot keep a finger on it. This while running just Microsoft's Windows Memory Diagnostic with the FSB set to 320MHz. I dread to think what temps it would soar to if I tried going to 400MHz or above.

Quirk: While I had no clearance problems when installing my Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro, there is going to be a problem putting a fan on the Northbridge. The fins of AC 7 Pro heat sink and the fan casing actually overhang the Northbridge a bit. Not by much. Only an 1/8 of an inch or so. But it's enough to interfere with the installation of a fan on the Northbridge. Right now I've "securely" attached my Northbridge fan using scotch tape. But I'm not sure what I'm going to do as a longer term solution. (Any suggestions?)

Complaint: BTW, Gigabyte did not include a NB fan with the motherboard. The Northbridge fan I'm using is something I dug up out of my old parts bin.

3) The mystery of the vanishing (G)MCH/Northbridge and ICH/Southbridge temperature sensors.
The first time I booted my DS3 and entered the BIOS I was very happy to see that the motherboard included temperature sensors for the (G)MCH/Northbridge and the ICH/Southbridge. I knew they must be there because I saw the entries for these temps listed right under the CPU temp as soon as I entered the PC Health Status section of the BIOS. "Nice touch", I remember saying to myself at the time.

Then I rebooted the system and ... poof! ... they were gone. I tried using CNTRL+F1 on the BIOS entry page to enable the "advanced options". Doing this allowed me to access the additional memory timing settings in the M.I.T. section, but resulted in no changes in what was displayed in the PC Health Status section. So for a bit I thought I had only dreamed that I'd seen it, but then the MCH/ICH temps showed up again the very first time I cleared the CMOS. This time I took the time to write down what I was seeing. There were definitely two "extra" lines in the PC Health Status section of the BIOS. One for the ICH tempature and one for the (G)MCH temperature.

And then, just like before, as soon as I booted out of the BIOS the readings vanished. And they have never showed up for me again even after clearing the CMOS. I'm very curious about this, but can't think of any way to get any meaningful answers about it. Given how hot that Northbridge tends to get I would really, truly, definitely prefer to have a temperature sensor available for it. But I guess I can also see that since the Northbridge gets as hot as it does, Gigabyte ... perhaps in hindsight ... might have decided they didn't want to advertise this information. As I say, it's a mystery. Oh, well.

4) Once AHCI is enabled for the purple Gigabyte/JMicron SATA ports, it damn well wants to STAY enabled!
Having read in a review (from AnandTech?) that there could be problems with PATA IDE if RAID/IDE was enabled for the JMicron SATA ports on the DS3, I certainly had no intention of ever going there. But I was curious about AHCI. My understanding was that if I wanted to do "hot plugging" then I'd need to use the JMicron SATA ports on the DS3 and enable AHCI for those ports in the BIOS. So I went into the BIOS and selected AHCI for the JMicron ports to try this out.

It worked. I had to install the (so-called) Gigabyte SATA driver when Windows came back up, but once I did that I could hot-plug and also disconnect a SATA drive using the purple ports. My purpose accomplished I went back into the BIOS, set the JMicron ports back to IDE, rebooted Windows, and opened the Device Manager to verify that the GBB36X Controller was gone.

Only it wasn't gone. The GBB36X Controller was still there even though I had definitely turned it off in the BIOS. Puzzled, I uninstalled it and rebooted. Windows promptly detected the "SCSI/RAID" device and reinstalled the GBB36X Controller. Long story short, nothing I did in the BIOS seemed to get rid of the GBB36X Controller. I disabled the purple ports and the GBB36X was still there in Device Manager. I think the only way I was able to get rid of it was by clearing the CMOS and deleting the Gigabyte SATA drivers from Windows. Weird, no?

That's all I've got for now. Any thoughts, comments, and especially insight! on any of the above would be appreciated.

-john, the ostensibly clueless redundant legacy-in-transition dinosaur

(I responded on the original thread as well)
@BIOS is buggy! Flash via floppy or not at all.
Carry on.....

You can use either CPU_FAN or SYS_FAN. What do you mean by weird omissions?

The Northbridge will be fine, as far as temperatures are concerned. There is no need to put a fan on this.

Again, no need to worry about the temperature from either Northbridge and Southbridge. If you are going to OC these two will have a pretty decent temperatures. Its not like these bridge would melt or something.

If you can't get it to work, don't use it

....and in my world the painfully hot northbridge heatsink (that literally hundreds of posts have mentioned putting a fan on) doesn't affect my motherboard at all....its simply there to warm my heart...

Ive seen some using a noctua heatsink on the northbridge but a fan should do the trick without voiding your warranty or putting your MB at risk. Theres just not that much room once you have installed your cpu HSF and a fan fits easiest. I get a kick out of the people who advocate ignoring northbridge heatsink heat when a simple fan will do wonders to cool things down. Heat has always been the enemy to computers overclocked or otherwise.

I agree. I have never had a heatsink so hot as the NB gets at 430Mhz. Like I said in another post, I'm putting a Sycthe Mini Kaze on mine. Its not much airflow (5cfm or so) but it is very quiet and only about $4. If it works... why not?

I know what you mean.... times 3! I decided to do the whole works and quiet my PC. The problem is that I picked the top three fans from each category (40mm, 92mm, 120mm), and not one single mail order company had even two of the three fans that I wanted in stock. So I ended up ordering the Scythe mini kaze from frozenpc, a bunch of yate loon 120mm fans from jab-tech, and a couple of Scythe 92mm fans from Newegg. The total was about $65, and $17 of it was shipping!

These fans will go to replace every noisy fan in two systems in two Antec Solo cases, and should make them nearly silent when installed.

I have a new PC built about ten days ago using 965P-DS3 (rev 3.3).

With an Artic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro more than taking care of my E6600 CPU, 1 120mm exhaust fan and two 92mm intake fans on the case, and a trailing edge X300SE graphics card, this is mostly one cool box. The one thing hot in the machine is the MCH (Northbridge). As so many have noted--painfully hot to touch for even a second or two.

I've had a persistent problem with hot boots and restarts since I built the machine. More often than not, a hot boot or restart got me nothing on my LCD screen after tens of seconds, and I'd power down. If I waited 15 minutes with the cover off, it would always boot properly, I think. Shorter (hotter?) times were more iffy.

Oddly, I've had very stable behavior in Windows. I had a couple of freezes during overclocking--I think probably caused by insuffiently conservative RAM parameters. But otherwise the Windows behavior is flawless. Odd that seems in a machine with such trouble booting.

So today I read this thread and finally acted on my diagnostic thought. I kludged in an 80mm Panasonic low-flow fan, a couple of inches from the North Bridge blowing toward it.

Since then I've had two successful restarts.

I'm starting to think my hot boot, hot restart problem is at least partly North Bridge related.

Have others seen such a relationship?

Does anyone know a way to see North and South Bridge temperatures on this board while in Windows?

I also saw the BIOS numbers just three time--once on first boot, once after loading F10, and once after doing a CLR_CMOS when I got my F10 settings into a state which had an even more disastrous boot behavior--two seconds of power after power on, with normal HD and Optical drive activity, followed by three seconds of power off--cycling as long as I let it (more than ten cycles).

I've got an RMA number. But if this is normal behavior for this board, and the fan "fix" continues to work, maybe I should just keep it. Please say "No".

An 80mm fan for the NB and an AC Freezer Pro on the CPU? 8O Wow. That's got to be a tight fit. I'd low to know how you kludged it into place.
Got any pictures?
This is by no means a permanent installation--it is just leaning there. Also the air flow efficiency to the sink is lousy. But I do think it is cooling appreciably (I can hold my finger on the sink for several seconds--with CPU use at 100% at a 20% overclock). I think I could lash one corner of the fan to the fan cage of the Freezer Pro with a cable tie, so if I can find one more lash point, maybe I could leave it almost this way.

Per my OP, my guess is that the sensors for the NB and SB temps are present in the hardware, but for unknown reasons Gigabyte has decided to not make the sensors available to us. I got the impression from your post that you also briefly saw the temps for the NB & SB temps displayed in the BIOS. You just saw them two times and then never again, correct?

Three times--once on initial system boot (it was born F9), once after I loaded up F10, and once more after I hit CLR_CMOS.

I suspect if you want to see it again, and don't mind losing your settings, shorting out the CLR_CMOS pins might do it. And yes, I also think it strange.

Well, that didn't work in my case. I've cleared the CMOS at least once or twice more since the last time I saw the NB & SB temps in the BIOS.
Mini Kaze seems a good idea. I have zero 40mm fan experience, so am having a little trouble with the idea that a fan over 3000 rpm is considered "quiet". More importantly, I have no idea how to mount it. If someone with one on this board cared to post a picture they could probably induce sales of hundreds of this fan.

After this post, I tried CLR_CMOS. As you observed, no return of bridge temperatures. I surmise that something else which happened before I cleared CMOS was a critical part of the enabling sequence (I don't want to go there again, that was my infinite loop of power-on self power-off on a repeat cycle of 5 seconds).

Right now I consider my Motherboard's many, many times repeated failure to restart and boot an as-shipped failure to perform, and do intend to RMA the board for replacement. But I also intend to rig some sort of cooling for the North Bridge. Even if it has nothing to do with my "hot boot" problem, it just seems insanely hot compared to the rest of a pretty decently cooled system I intend to use for a long time.

My 80mm fan kludge, aside from its other defects, seems to have slightly unbalanced the Artic Cooling FP 7. I got some disturbing sounds never heard before from the box, which went away when I turned off the science ap I was running. I'm still leaving it in for the rest of the weekend, until I RMA the board.

Hey all,
Just thought I'd update things on my build. All went well. The board came with the f10 bios and is currently OC'd to 2.7ghz with an e4300 on stock volts whilst I try and get some video editing projects done that have been on the backburner. Anyone know a decent DVD burning program? I have nero 6.6 lite (oem show me the stutter version) and Adobe premeire 6.5 (awesome but I cant burn DVDs with it). Nero lite leaves much to be desired. Anyway, no cold reboot issues seen on this board. I'm at 9x300 with the 2.66 multiplier and I have an Abit chipset fan I salvaged from my T-bird's MB fixed on the northbridge using nifty specialized medical tape. The board is rock solid with no vdroop noted with my moderate OC.

The Rev 2 board also has this.......

The Rev 2 board also has this.......
Thanks, for mentioning this. I don't recall it ever being mentioned in any of the supposed "follow-up" articles I read at AnandTech and other sites.

(It seems (to me) like something they should have mentioned since they thought it was worth pointing out that there were only 2 fan headers in reviews of v1.0 of this board. If a reviewer comments about something and then the manufacturer later makes a change, I think the reviewer should be considerate enough to point out that the manufacturer was good enough to respond).

-john

Gigabyte has added a Benefits of the GIGABYTE rev 3.3 Motherboards "article" to their Geeks Column of the Week section. While the main thrust of the article is of course to pump up sales of their motherboards, figured it was worth mentioning because it does say some (small) things I haven't heard before. Here are some quotes covering what I think were the changes mentioned between 3.3 and the early versions.
While most of the GIGABYTE P965 rev 1.0 / 2.0 boards are also capable of supporting 1333MHz FSB through the latest BIOS update, GIGABYTE has made some hardware enhancements that squeeze maximum performance out of these next generation processors. To start, GIGABYTE has optimized the FSB routing design to improve signal quality for not only 1333MHz FSB CPUs, but for Intel quad-core processors as well. By widening the FSB trace routing, FSB impedance has been reduced from 50 ohms to 42 ohms. This impedance means there is less resistance for the electrical signal to travel between the CPU and the FSB, increasing the speed at which the signal travels and improving signal quality.GIGABYTE rev 3.3 motherboards also feature a 6 phase and above power design that is able to deliver steadier power and immediate current to the CPU and memory during heavy system workloads such as overclocking.For the rev 3.3 motherboards, GIGABYTE has used higher quality covered flat chokes.GIGABYTE has also added fuses for the USB ports.GIGABYTE has increased the number of audio capacitors on the rev 3.3 motherboards to ensure the most rich, high-definition audio experience possible.
Now if only I knew how much any of the above actually mattered. Still, I figure it can't hurt, can it? And it is nice to see some a manufacturer making some improvements to a board. Gives me hope for future updates to the BIOS as well.

-john, the ostensibly clueless redundant legacy-in-transition dinosaur

Well, I got confused by the cpu-Z readout today into thinking my second 965P-DS3 was rev 9 BIOS (it was actually rev 10, which reports as rev 9 for some purposes).

Anyway, when I flashed using the Q-Flash utility, on the first subsequent boot the PC health screen indeed showed MCH and ICH temperatures. I grabbed screen shots with my mini Kaze off, then on. In a case with pretty good ventilation (120mm rear fan extracting at 1380 rpm, two 92mm front fans injecting at 1541 rpm), the reported MCH temperature was 59 C without the fan, and over about 5 minutes after turning the fan on dropped to 46 C.

Pictures in the NB temperature thread.



Excellent! At least you confirm what my fingers felt with/without the mini kaze.

A second 965P-DS3, archae86? 8O

Is this another system for your use, for a friend/family, or for something work related?

Just curious ... and I don't actually know why I'm curious. Guess a part of me would like to put together another DS3 system ... not that I have any need for one ... or, more to the point, as if I could justify spending the money.

-john, the ostensibly clueless redundant legacy-in-transition dinosaur

Ouch! Sorry I didn't recall the problem you were having with hot reboots and your RMA. Also sorry to hear that the replacement board did not solve the problem. Wish I could offer advice, but unfortunately I've got nothing to offer.

The next >$700 "investment" currently on my "to-do" list is a new muffler for my Subaru Outback. Of course, $700 would also be about the cost of a new refrigerator which is also on the list. Lately I've been noticing that a lot of "need to do" things seem to cost about as much as a new refrigerator :? ... but I digress.

System migration can be hard. There should really be a blues song about it ...

Doing a Windows repair install can work and you may want to ponder it a bit more. In the past, I've argued quite sincerely that it was the a good way to go when moving to a new motherboard/CPU. But then when it came time for me to actually bite the bullet, I whimped out and decided to go with a "pretty much" clean install for the DS3.

Of course, it wasn't quite as simple as that. I played around with the DS3 for a week or two before actually committing to using it full time by authenticating my Windows install. During that time I installed Windows XP "a bunch" of times. Sometimes I did a repair install to a copy of my OS partition from my previous system. Other times I went with a clean install to a formatted partition. In the end, I decided that for the most part I did not have any "hard to migrate" program configuration settings that I would loath loosing and so I started over sorta from scratch. I did a format & clean install, but then copied configuration stuff over from old system.

I turned off most of what XP's Files & Settings Transfer Utility would ordinarily touch and moved just my Windows config settings, the stuff on the Desktop and a folder or two from %appdata% (aka \Documents and Settings\<youruserid>\Application Data). This turned out to be maybe 97% of the config I cared about. (I think)

Of course, I had a "spare" hard drive I could use as the OS drive on my DS3. So I still have my original OS partition sitting in my old system if I feel the need to "get to it". But I'm thinking it's now getting to be time to backup that old OS partition to DVDs and move on ... maybe I'll actually do that. It could happen ...

-john, the ostensibly clueless redundant legacy-in-transition dinosaur

Hello all,

have been folllowing this thread for a while as I wanted to include Northbridge & Southbrige temperatures into my speefan monitoring.

Well after reading quite a few forums, I finally found the answer on a german forum; if you want to have ICHM & MCH temperatures showing permanently in the Bios (PC Health) and in your OS; you need to enable the automatic Intel QST Fan management in the Bios. Once enabled, save the settings (F10); and voila; these temperatures are now always availble !!

On my XP SP3, it then asked me for a driver for a new device, after a bit of searching, I found that the driver need is called Intel HECI and is found on the Gygabite driver CD that shipped with the board (in Chipset\HECI).

Now without additional configuration, Speedfan has picked up both new temperatures; very happy

Hope this helps some of you too