Intel 965/975 mainboards for Core 2 Duo tested

Introduction

When looking for a mainboard to plug your new Core 2 Duo processor in the most obvious choice is a board with either a 975X or a 965 chipset. The 975X chipset has been around for quite some time now and has been the high-end chipset for two processor generations. The newer revisions of boards with this chipset are all suitable for the Core processors. The P965 chipset is a new midrange chipset designed for the Core 2 Duo CPU's, and although motherboards with this chipset lack some of the features that the 975X has, they are a lot cheaper than boards with the high end chipset.

Click here to compare all the specifications of the motherboards tested.

Intel 975X revised

The 975X is the high end chipset, so you expect higher performance. The 975X is also the only Intel chipset that officially supports ATI's CrossFire: The 16 PCI-Express lanes can be divided into two PCI-Express x8 slots and the two cards can be used. It is not possibile yet to get an SLI setup working on an Intel motherboard, as nVidia's drivers will not allow this, but we found that CrossFire does operate perfectly on a 975X board. The 975X chipset officially supports DDR2-667, however our experience is that DDR2 800 works flawlessly as well, as a result the possility for DDR2-800 has surfaced on the 975X boards in later BIOS revisions.

The Intel 975X is usually paired with the ICH7R south bridge, that supports 4 Serial ATA 300 ports in RAID 0, 1, 5 or 1+0. The ICH7R furthermore supports one PATA connection, 8 USB 2.0 ports and High Definition Audio.

On two of the boards we tested we found the ICH7DH (Digital Home) south bridge, a special edition meant to be used in VIIV multimedia PC's. One of the extra features of the DH chipset is QuickResume, that will allow a media centre to wake up from the standby mode within two seconds. On most other features the DH and R models are identical.