Intel P965: Roundup Recap and Awards

Summarization and Support

After numerous reviews, thousands of hours of testing, and reams of collected information we can safely say that an Intel P965 is still an Intel P965 no matter which motherboard you place it in. This is not a real surprise with each manufacturer utilizing the same basic chipset and BIOS code from Intel. What has made a difference since the P965 chipset launched is the ability of each supplier to customize the BIOS code as well as the option to offer a bevy of features at each price point. The current boards that are shipping now are fairly mature and most of the lessons learned regarding layout designs, component choices, or user enhancements are being implemented in the next generation of P965 motherboards. We only have to look at the difference between the abit AB9 Pro and the new AB9 QuadGT to understand how manufacturers are addressing their short comings.

We do not believe the overall performance of the next wave of P965 motherboards will improve drastically over the current boards, although we do expect to see incremental improvements in memory and overclocking performance as the BIOS engineers have had time to learn the intricacies of the chipset. This generally happens to every chipset family over time but we are excited about 1T capability above DDR2-800 and potentially 8x8 operation for CrossFire for improved performance over the 975X chipset.

While we believe performance is still extremely important, it is no longer the only reason to consider a particular motherboard supplier. In our opinion, the features, price, warranty, support, and reliability of the motherboard should be first on your list as stock performance will generally be nearly equal among all motherboards based on the same chipset. To a lesser degree even the performance variations between different chipsets for the same CPU family are negligible. It comes back to features and support for making that final decision.

We would love to recommend and present an award to every motherboard. Depending upon your situation any of these motherboards will work perfectly fine as a home office or casual gaming board, and most will do so with few if any issues. However, there are a few motherboards that just did the job better or had support teams that swayed our opinion. We are still finalizing our supplier support article, as the NVIDIA launch of the 680i and 650i products threw us for a twist and have led us down a different path in some cases when looking at overall product support. In the meantime, here's a quick summary of the support we have seen thus far.

We received varying support from each supplier and not in a way you would think. Our direct support was excellent but we wanted to find out how well the manufacturer supported a retail customer so we acted like one. We logged on to their support forums if available and asked questions about our issues or those of other users. We purchased retail boards and called technical support. We emailed, faxed, or otherwise bugged the hell out some customer support personnel for the last six weeks. We will provide more detailed results in a separate article, but these results did help to determine our Editor's Choice awards. After all, it's not just about performance anymore.

We believe that Gigabyte has made the greatest progress in product implementation, execution, and support since we first reviewed the P965 products in July. The GA-965P-DS3 and GA-965P-DQ6 were products that we strongly criticized for not living up to their potential, and over the course of time Gigabyte showed true concern about resolving customer issues. They worked diligently at resolving the Micron D9 issues while adding other features into their BIOS releases. We also found their technical and customer support groups to be very friendly and quick to address most of our problems - problems that we presented to these support groups as actual board owners and not as a review site. While we received very good service from Gigabyte, not all owners we have spoken with feel the same way. Every person has their own opinions and expectations about what support means and how a product should work. One thing holds true for every supplier, however: none of them are perfect and none of the products we have reviewed are perfect either.

ASUS is one of the best design and feature innovators in our group and consistently had a product in just about every price category that had top performance results. They continually improve their products and address issues (at least to a certain degree). The next series of P965 motherboards featuring the Commando and Vista Edition products have already shown great promise in both performance and feature sets. The P5B-Deluxe WiFi-AP was the first P965 motherboard we looked at and it continues to be the standard that other P965 motherboards are judged by. ASUS technical support was very good most of the time, but there were times we did not receive an answer or reply quickly. The ASUS forums provided very good feedback but at times it was from other users and not the technical service personnel. Several ASUS owners felt the same way and it seemed as if the technical support on certain boards was excellent while on others it was not. Opinions from users about ASUS support would typically elicit very strong opinions that were almost always positive or negative, with very little being in the middle.

Technical and customer support provided by Biostar and Foxconn was very good, although we have to admit that Biostar was one company that we rarely contacted. The products after the initial BIOS updates were just superb considering the market they targeted and the minor amount of issues we experienced. Foxconn had very good support for the product we inquired about but once again except for a storage drive issue while overclocking we did not really have that many discussions with them. BIOS updates from both companies seemed to address the majority of the reported problems from us and other customers. Our experience seemed to fall into line with the customers we spoke with, although several support request answers were slow in coming.

abit has an excellent support forum and customer service personnel that followed up quickly on our issues. Although we are still seeing new product release issues, their recent track record indicates those same issues will be resolved. abit owners seemed to very vocal about receiving good support although most admitted it sometimes takes too long for a BIOS update to correct issues. We found that abit does listen to their customers and we already see product improvements in their series of P965 motherboards, but we still have some quality assurance concerns in final testing of the BIOS and software features. Except for the JMicron controller issues, the other major issues we reported on in our AB9 QuadGT preview have been solved as of today.

MSI also provided very good technical support and customer service when utilizing their request forms, but the answers we received were a little late in our opinion, and in one case we received a canned response that didn't really address our problem. The MSI forum support was excellent and the community was very helpful when describing various issues. We would feel very comfortable recommending a MSI product based upon our experiences. That leaves ECS and their Support Form system. It was hit or miss on the answers we received if we received them, indicating they have some knowledgeable support personnel but also some people that don't really know what they're talking about. Depending on who answers your support request, you may get a quick resolution to your problem or you may end up very frustrated.

We will provide further details in the near future, but it is now time to look at the motherboards that we believe offered the best overall user experience in our testing. We are looking at all aspects of each board, with the support we received definitely playing a large role. We have to be blunt about one subject. None of the boards are perfect or even near perfect when compared to more mature solutions like the 975X or even Socket 939/AM2 products, but in our opinion each board we felt deserving of an award had strengths that greatly outweighed their weaknesses.