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The GA-X38-DQ6 board supports 800/1066/1333/1600 MHz Intel Celeron D, Pentium 4/D/XE and Core 2 Duo/Quad processors. This platform comes equipped with DDR2 memory slots, and can be installed with a
maximum of 8GB of DDR2-1066 MHz memory.
87% Rating: 
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PCSTATS Maximum Motherboard Overclocking Chart & Conclusions
Overclocking is alive and well! PCSTATS
has all the details you need to see at a glance to know which board is best. The
chart we've compiled below lists the highest overclocked Front Side Bus speeds
we were able to achieve while maintaining 100% stability.
The Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6 motherboard is
the fastest motherboard that we've tested so far, it's great to see how well the
Intel X38 Express motherboards overclock!
Dawn of the Intel X38
Express
The GA-X38-DQ6 certainly has the look and feel of a high
end motherboard, and boy does it come with a lot of goodies. I'm happy to see
that Gigabyte puts eight USB 2.0 slots on the rear I/O, with the large number of
external devices, you can hook up anything and everything to this board without
running out of ports.
The layout of the Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6 motherboard is
excellent and it's clear that Gigabyte designed this board for tweakers.
Everything is in the correct position, the motherboard is very well labeled and
the colour coordination allows you to set the motherboard up without having to
refer to the manual. Even novice computer users will find setting things up
easy.
Feature wise the Intel X38 Express brings a couple new
things to the table; PCI Express 2.0, Intel's XMP for DDR3 and of course the
higher bus speed. None play a huge role right now, but it's nice that the
chipset is relatively future proof.
The Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6 is definitely quick around the
corners and the motherboard performed pretty well in the benchmarks. With the
ability to run ECC memory the GA-X38-DQ6 is a great workstation platform, at
least better than Intel P35 Express based motherboards which lack that feature.
Sandra confirms that the platform has a lot of raw power too so that's good if
you're doing a lot of data crunching.
 In gaming the Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6 gave us some mixed messages
although on the whole the platform does look faster than Intel's mainstream
alternatives. FarCry was the only game that was consistently giving us lower
framerates but everything else from Quake 4 and the 3DMark tests said the
Gigabyte motherboard was fast.
When it comes to overclocking the Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6
and the Intel X38 Express is definitely game. This motherboard reached a very
sweet 525 MHz and that is high enough for you to overclock your CPU and memory
to its max. The Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6 is definitely one of the fastest
motherboards we've tested so far and the picture is certainly bright for the
Intel X38 Express!
Some of you may be wondering why Gigabyte chose to equip
the GA-X38-DQ6 with DDR2 memory instead of DDR3. With DDR3 under performing at
the moment and with the price premium of the new memory standard, Gigabyte
simply felt that it's not worth going DDR3. That in itself is quite a statement
and DDR2 is really better for dual core processors. The Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6
motherboard is quite a catch, and it's better than the Intel P35 Express
motherboards on the market.
Find out about this and many other reviews by joining
the Weekly PCstats.com Newsletter today! Catch all of PCSTATS
latest reviews right here.
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