High-End Chipset Battle

Not many motherboards offer eight USB 2.0 ports on the back panel.

All Gigabyte DQ6 series motherboards come with a 12-phase voltage regulator, which is just about ideal for enthusiasts. However, only the latest motherboards also come with the DES power saving feature, which allows users to reduce the number of phases dynamically, to increase power efficiency. If only overclocking and power saving would not exclude each other…

The cooling solution doesn’t support liquid cooling products like the Asus solution, but it’s still efficient enough to beat the FSB speed record set by Asus.

Gigabyte supplies all necessary cables, including six SATA cables, the twin eSATA module, floppy and UltraATA cables, as well as adapters to power SATA drives via Molex connectors.

Gigabyte adds a mass storage controller to be able to offer UltraATA/133 ports. Clearly, Gigabyte doesn’t share Intel’s opinion of UltraATA being obsolete.

The box is shiny and impressive, but don’t be blinded by all the marketing buzz words.