Introduction

Intel currently has a very aggressive pricing strategy, dropping prices a lot about every other month, the Core 2 Duo CPUs have become very affordable and a complete C2D based system is now possible for many paired with a mainboard in the lower pricing range. Luckily lower pricing range doesn't mean low performance; or that's at least what Jetway is trying to prove with their Intel 965 chipset based mainboard, the 966PDAG-PB.



The board comes in a fairly simple box, presenting directly the main features of the board. Inside the box we find the driver CD, manual and a few SATA, IDE and floppy cables. The manual is outdated and partially incorrect; I'll show you later on why. The software installation tool starts up immediately when the CD is inserted in the drive and a colourfully menu pops up. On the right side you have the possibility to install all the drivers (for chipset, audio, Lan, ...), as well as a monitoring tool for the hardware. Not many words are written to explain what you’re actually installing, and those that are used contain simple spelling errors.... The hardware monitoring tool is built on the same amateurship level, and showing values that are completely off:



As you can see the voltages are being shown completely incorrect, the temperatures are also wrong, but that's due to the sensors. Bios shows us the same, impossible, temperatures.





Specifications


click thumb for hi res picture

Intel P965 Express Chipset + ICH8 Chipset .

Intel LGA775 Conroe Processor .

Support FSB 1066MHz

Dual channel DDR2 800 / 667 / 533 Memory DIMMs .

Support Bi-GPU-Link with 2 PCI-Express x16 Slots Design .

Support 3 Serial ATA2 Devices .

Support 1 ATA-100 IDE Devices

10 USB2.0 Connectors Embedded.

Gigabit LAN Supported .

AZALIA 8 Channel Audio CODEC.

CPU Vcore 7-Shift.

ATX Form Factor

Take also a look at the Jetway site.

The board is based on the Intel P965 chipset, combined with the Intel ICH8 south bridge. Below you can see the possibilities of these chips combined:



Normally the P965 chipset offers one full speed PCI express 16x slot. When using only one card the upper VGA slot provides optimal 16x bandwidth. Added a second card and using crossfire or SLI (with non-official drivers), both the slots will operate at 8x PCIe bandwidth. This is half the normal speed, but surely not limiting any mainstream videocards.

Bi-GPU-Link / Advanced Dual PCI Express Graphics Interfaces Solutions. With the innovative one PCI Express x16 slot and one Opened-PCI-Express x4 slot design, the P965 Express chipset based motherboard offers with two PCI Express graphics interfaces with full bandwidth of 16 lanes and quarter bandwidth of 16 lanes for the latest released PCI Express x16 compatible VGA cards of both NVIDIA & ATI. By running dual PCI-Express graphics cards simultaneously, this motherboard provides the ability to connect to as many as four separate displays.

Two PCIe 16x/8x slots and 2 * PCIe 1x slots

When we take a look at the possible storage expansion capabilities we see a normal amount of three SATA ports. Not that much as you can see that the chipset supports up to 6 SATA ports. Besides that we have the usual floppy drive connector and and IDE/PATA connection port. The manual states that we can connect up to two devices, what would be normal. But after some testing I took a closer look at the mainboard self, and there I saw that the IDE port only supports one device, in master mode.

More about this board ->

A closer look continued

On the rear I/O panel we find the Regular PS/2 ports for keyboard and mouse, a serial port, 4 USB 2.0 ports, and RJ45 connector for lan, and the 6 audio plugs for the surround sound.



On the bottom of the board we find 3 more USB headers, allow connecting up to 6 USB ports. No PCI header is provided, and I still need to find a case that has 6 USB ports. So you'll need to find yourself one or more extra USB/PCI headers.



Extra features are CPU thermal throttling and fan controlling features:

Since a few years the 24 pins ATX power supply connection has become standard on the current mainboards. The 8 pins extra power connector can for the moment only be found on higher end boards and server boards. It's good to see that Jetway added this connector to provide optimal power routing to the board. This combined with solid caps (around the socket) should provide stable CPU voltages. The board features OC-CON high-polymer solid electrolysis aluminium capacitors embedded. The working temperature is from 55 degrees Centigrade below zero to 125 degrees Centigrade, OC_CON capacitors possess superior physical characteristics that can be while reducing the working temperature between 20 degrees Centigrade each time, intact extension 10 times of effective product operation lives, at not rising degrees Centigrade of working temperatures each time a relative one, life of product decline 10% only too.

BIOS & overclocking ->

BIOS explored

Although the Jet way is a rather budget minded board, it has a wide range of bios overclocking options. To name the most important:

• CPU clock ratio can be changed, depending on the CPU it can go from 6x to …
  
• CPU host clock, or known as the front side bus can be set from 266 Mhz up to 600 Mhz (using a 1066 Mhz fsb processor).
  
• Dram clock can be set to SPD, 533 Mhz, 667 Mhz or 800 Mhz.
  
• Cpu Vcore goes from 0,83125V all the way to 1,59375 Volt, in very little steps of about 0,0150 Volt. Besides that you can also activate the option CPU Vcore 7-shift, which allows you to add an extra +50mV, just up to +350 mV.
  
• North bridge (P965) chipset voltage can be set from 1,16V to 1,62 volt in steps of about 0,03 volt.
  
• DDR2 memory voltage starts at 1,73V and can be set to 2,43 V insteps of 0,04 Volt. Keep in mind that 2,43 VDDR2 is actually very high.

Monitoring screen & general overview


FSB & Ram settings



Main voltage settings


Memory settings + timings

Overclocking

With all this settings you might expect a straight boot to 400 Mhz FSB. Unfortunately the Bios is very picky when you change a little thing. Change too many setting such as voltages and clock speeds at once and the board refuses to boot. You must change most settings one by one, and don’t take too high FSB steps, or you’ll be having the same non-boot problem. Once the settings have proven themselves stable the board will run 24/7 and let you reboot and do cold boots with any hassle.

After a Cmos clear you’ll experience the problem again, even if you have some settings that have proven to be stable, you’ll still have to set them one by one and in small steps.

Using a 2 Gig Kit of OCZ DDR2 pc7200 (with Micron D9 chips), I could reach a max FSB of about 380-385Mhz. Not bad for a budget board. And I didn’t bother further testing, as nor memory, nor CPU were limiting factor. The CPU has proven to operate at over 500 fsb and the memory did close to 600 Mhz…. A bit later, I tested the mainboard with another kit of OCZ, a 1 Gig PC6400 set. Nothing fancy. And suddenly the board reached up to 400-405 Mhz. I retested with the 2 gig kit, but that limited me to 385 Mhz.




click thumb for zoom

On to the first tests ->

Test setup + benchmarks

The following test platform was used:

Test Setup
CPU	Intel Core 2 Duo E6320
Mainboard	Asus P5K Jetway 966PDAG-PB
Memory	2 * 512Mb OCZ DDR2 PC6400
Other	XFX 8500GT OCZ 600 Watt PSU Nec DVD writer 1x Western Digital 80 gig Windows XP SP2 installed + latest drivers

Tests:

SiSoftware Sandra XI: Arithmetic, Multimedia and Memory Bandwidth benchmarks are used for all motherboard tests.

SuperPi Mod v1.5 XS: testing PI calculations which stress co-processor and memory sub-systems. We run 1M and 8M calculations.

Lavalys Everest: Memory read and write speeds. As well as memory latency.

3DMark06: Freeware version from Futuremark tests, CPU, Memory and graphics.

3DMark2001 SE: Discontinued Freeware version, however; this benchmark is still valuable as a tool for testing 3D and memory performance.

MAXON CineBench 9.5: this benchmark stresses the CPU and graphics system primarily using OpenGL.

FEAR mp demo: built in benchmark tests CPU, memory and graphics.

Colin Mc Rae Dirt: The free demo was downloaded and played.

We tested the Jetway and the Asus P5K on stock speeds. Using SPD memory timings (400 Mhz 5-5-5-15). We also added the overclocked Jetway mainboard/cpu combination with the CPU operating at 2.8 GHz, the memory at 400 Mhz as well, but with 4-4-4-14 timings.

Synthetic benches

3D mark 2001 & 2006

Firstly we'll be testing the famous Futuremark benchmarks. In both 3d mark 2001 and 2006 the Jetway mainboard takes a very lead. But the differences are fractions of percents. It's more interesting to state that the budget minded Jetway with Intel P965 can keep up with the newer P35 based board.


Result in marks, higher is better

Then we took a look at the CPU score, calculated by 3d mark 2006. Here we find the same trend, the differences are almost nothing.


CPU score, higher is better

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Superpi

Superpi scores are about the same, with a slight advantage for the P35 board. We'll see that those slight advantages come due to a fraction faster memory bandwidth as you'll on the following graphs. But keep in mind, the differences are very small.


Result in seconds, lower is better

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Everest Home Edition

Looking at both the memory bandwidth and latency in Everest home edition, we cannot find any real difference.


Result in bandwidth, higher is better


Result in latency, lower is better

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Sisoft Sandra

Looking at both the memory and CPU tests in Sisoft Sandra we cannot find any real difference.


Result in bandwith, higher is better


CPU score, higher is better

More ->

Application Benchmark

CINEBENCH is the free benchmarking tool based on the powerful 3D software CINEMA 4D. Consequently, the results of tests conducted using CINEBENCH 9.5 carry significant weight when analyzing a computer’s performance in everyday use. Especially a system’s CPU and the OpenGL capabilities of its graphics card are put through their paces (even multiprocessor systems with up to 16 dedicated CPUs or processor cores). During the testing procedure, all relevant data is ascertained with which the performance of different computers can subsequently be compared, regardless of operating system.



This shouldn't come as a surprise, but in Cinebench we see exact the same. there are no differences, performance is on par.

Gaming performance

Now we're going to test a some games on a both high (1280-1024) as on lower (800*600) resolution.

FEAR

To test FEAR we used two different resolutions, with a medium detail level. And with the built in benchmark tool. The results were as good as on par, with a very minimal advantage in favor of the P5K.

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Collin Mc Rae Dirt

Here we played for a few minutes the demo. The used resolution was 800*600 and this with medium details. Higher resolution tests weren't possible. During the test the frames were monitored and logged with FRAPS. The outcome was as expected, about no noticeable difference.



On to the final words ->

Conclusive thoughts

The first impressions of this board weren't that positive. Not that good software, which looked amateurish. The manual wasn't completely correct as well, and the only 1 device IDE port gave me an overall negative idea, as there board was skimping on features and documentation.

But after some testing the board showed to be very stable with decent performance. The board can keep up at stock speeds with the newer Intel P35 based Asus P5K board. And that board costs almost double!

Overclocking can be frustrating though as the bios acts a bit strange, requiring you to make unnecessary small changes and manual reboot in order to get the board running above specifications. Let’s hope a BIOS update can iron out these bugs. If you put in some time there is a reward at the end, a stable overclock of 400Mhz from a budget P965 board is not bad at all! Combined with a Core 2 Duo CPU which are known to be highly overclockable you get quite a bit of free performance.

Jetway 966PDAG-PB Recommended for:


PRO
Great performance
Decent overclocking
Sharp price (<70 euro)

CON
BIOS issues make overclocking harder than it should be.
Software and manual amateurish look, needs refinement.
Only 4 HDD/optical devices possible.

The board can be had for less than 70 euro at Dollarshops.eu. Big thanks for Leon from dollarshops who was so kind to lend us this board for a test drive, and for his enormous patience !