Gigabyte space the wo physical PCI Express x16 slots far apart from each other, so dual-slot videocards fit easily. If you are going to run two videocards, the Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 motherboard allocates 16 PCI Express lanes to the primary videocard, 4 PCI Express lanes to the secondary (disabling all three PCI Express x1 slots in the process).

Intel dropped the ball with the ICH8R by doing away with parallel IDE support... but igabyte includes a proprietory IDE/Serial ATA controller on the GA-965P-DQ6 that offers us one IDE channel and two extra SATA2.0 channels. Obviously, the IDE is best served supporting optical drives, and SATA for hard drives. There are the six orange Serial ATA II channels from via the ICH8R Southbridge, the two purple ones from the Gigabyte Serial ATA II controller. Three USB2.0 headers and two IEEE1394 Firewire headers stand ready.

Gigabyte has colour coordinated which DIMM slots to occupy to enable dual channel memory support. The four DDR2 memory slots accommodate up to 8GB of DDR2-400/533/667/800 memory. The main 24 pin ATX power connector, floppy and auxiliary power connectors are located in a good spot and easy to access.

The Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 and its' Intel P965 Express chipset is ideally suited to LGA775 1066MHZ FSB Intel processors. There's plenty of space around the CPU socket and the MOSFET/VRM heatsinks are low enough that it will not interfere with bulky third party heatsinks. If you're going to be installing a water or passive cooling system on the processor though, make sure you point a fan toward this area!

A single heatpipe joins the Intel ICH8R and 965 Express chipsets. Two heat pipes conduct heat from the latter towards a series of folded copper fin MOSFET heatsink that circle the CPU socket.

Gigabyte equips the GA-965P-DQ6 with solid state capacitors, this increases the price of the motherboard slightly but improves the durability and stability of the system. Usually this is a step motherboard manufacturers only take with high end of parts. It's good to see Gigabyte extend this to mainstream models too.