The layout of the GA-965P-DQ6 is very clean and centers around the solid capacitors, a heatpipe cooling system running through 4 strapping heatsinks, and a wealth of connectivity.
You can see the DIMM sockets for the dual channel DDR2 memory interface below. As usual, the sockets are color coded to indicate matching pairs of memory.
Right beside the main 24 pin ATX power connector we have the floppy connector and a four pin drive power connector.
As you can see this board has a heatpipe design for cooling the chipset. Note the eight pin secondary power connector - and as we noted, the motherboard also takes a four pin drive power connector; so Gigabyte certainly did not skimp on supplying the motherboard with power!
Note also the snazzy all solid state capacitor design. Every single capacitor is a new high quality solid capacitor - those are the silver colored capacitors all around the board, instead of the regular ones you are used to seeing. Gigabyte is one of the first manufacturers to go this route. Solid capacitors have increased component life, so no more leaky and bulgy capacitors (though these are rare to begin with). Gigabyte also claims that solid capacitors provide more stability under extreme conditions.
Here below is the additional "Crazy Cool" cooler plate attached to the bottom of the board below the processor's socket. Gigabyte's intention for including this is to help dissipate heat, we just think it looks cool :). Unfortunately we later found the Crazy Cool plate to be a nuissance for installing custom coolers.
On the IO panel we see PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports, a parallel port, a serial port, SP-DIFF and optical audio outputs, four USB ports, gigabit ethernet port, firewire port and normal audio connectors.
For expansion, we have a PCIe 16x connector (with 16 lanes); a secondary PCIe connector (with 4 lanes), three PCIe 1x connectors, and two 33MHz PCI slots; so there is plenty of room for additional peripherals.
While some of you might be disappointed at Gigabyte only providing one ATA channel, I'll take those eight SATA2 connectors instead ANY day. With the six SATA2 ports supported by the Intel ICHR8 we have support for up to a six drive RAID-5 array - or have the option of having two three drive raid-5 arrays. Now that's flexibility! The two additional SATA2 ports are gravy; I can see using them for eSATA :-)
The three additional USB2 connectors bring us to 10 USB2.0 ports in total, and the additional firewire and SP-DIF connectors don't hurt either.
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