Although the cooler did fit, the installation wasn’t an easy one. First I had to move the retention bracket by 90º so that the cooler wouldn’t hit against the capacitors. Then I had to rotate the cooler itself by 180º for the same reason. Just thing about it: although the retention holes around LGA775 are symmetrical, the cooler can only be installed in one certain position. I had tons of coolers, but none of them fit right…

The use of warnings has long become an indisputable part of our life. Some of them are useful – when the coffee cup from McDonald’s warns you that the contents is hot. Some of them are funny – when the pack of roasted peanuts you get on the plane warns you that it may contain nuts. Why didn’t Gigabyte marketing guys warn the users that their solution was incompatible with many CPU coolers?

I am sure that the first thing that you thought of – just like I did – was to remove the Crazy Cool backplates. However, it turned out that the chipset North Bridge heatsink is fastened to one of these plates and if you remove the plate, you will also have to replace the North Bridge heatsink. And since there is a heatpipe coming from the chipset North Bridge heatsink to the South Bridge heat conductor, you will have to remove the entire chipset cooling system and buy something different. But why install something like that to begin with, why pay for something you will not actually need?

It looks like we have just revealed an evident contradiction: Crazy Cool cooling system that should help achieve better overclocking results is actually hindering overclocking if performed with CPU aircooling. Maybe Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 can work just fine with the default boxed cooler, but how will you achieve maximum overclocking result then? That is why I said before that this mainboard strikes me as puzzling: it harms itself.

The funny thing is that a lot of respected media awarded Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 with different titles such as Editor’s Choice, or Overclocker’s Choice. I still cannot understand why the mainboard that implies the use of boxed cooling solutions deserves such titles? Here I would like to remind you of some other issues that we often come across on Gigabyte products. Why don’t they show the voltage values in the BIOS? There are ways to get this data with different utilities, but I think it would be much simpler and better for everyone if this data was available to us right away.

Why do we have to press Ctrl+F1 to get access to all BIOS Setup settings? What is so dangerous for the inexperienced users that is being hidden from them? Commencing overclockers have been asking for help in different forums for a few years now: please help us find memory timing settings in the Gigabyte mainboard BIOS. How was it determined that memory timings adjustment is dangerous and the opportunity to send 2.375V to the CPU is harmless?

Why are we seeing higher nominal FSB frequency values? 700MHz for Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6: has anyone ever tried to set it this way? Back in the days when the CPUs could hardly hit 200MHz FSB, Gigabyte’s mainboards read 355MHz, and it looked cool. But now that the situation is changing, and overclocking on Gigabyte mainboards improves dramatically, why use such unreal numbers?

The sad thing is that if we forget about all the marketing load of “Quads”, if we remove the notorious Crazy Cool backplates from the bottom of the PCB, we will get a very good mainboard. How come Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 never appeared in a much more affordable and functionally perfect form?