The key feature of Gigabyte's GA-965P-DS4 motherboard is the chipset, but not necessarily in the way that you might expect. When Intel launched its superb Core 2 Duo processor (reviewed here), it was paired with the i975X/ICH7R chipset which worked very well and gave you four SATA ports and PCI Express as well as support for DDR2-533 memory.

But time moves on, so Intel has launched the 965P/ICH8R and yes, we know it's an earlier number, but honestly, it's new. 965P supports faster DDR2-667 memory but doesn't boost PCI Express performance so don't expect to run a pair of Radeon X1950 XTX graphics cards in CrossFire any time soon. The ICH8R Southbridge now supports six SATA ports, but this is at the expense of IDE which is dropped, while the audio has been upgraded from 'AC97 to HD.

Take all that together and the GA-965P-DS4 makes perfect sense. The most striking feature is the passive cooling system that links both parts of the chipset and the power regulation hardware. Core 2 Duo doesn't demand a great deal of power but it has to be the correct type of power so this motherboard is near-silent in operation. Well, the board itself is silent and the CPU is happy with a quiet cooler so the only source of noise will be the graphics card.

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On the I/O panel you get four USB 2.0 ports, one Firewire, Gigabit LAN and a full range of audio connectors including digital coaxial and optical.

Moving down the board we have the PCI Express 16x slot and below that is what looks like another 16x slot, but appearances are deceptive. This slot actually supports four PCI Express lanes (the chipset supports a total of 20 lanes) and if you choose to plug in an expansion card you'll find that the three PCI-E 1x slots are disabled. At the foot of the board are two conventional PCI slots.

In line with the PCI-E 4x slot are the six native SATA connectors, colour-coded in orange, as well as another pair of ports that are coloured purple to show that they are on a separate controller. The reason is that Gigabyte has been forced to add an IDE controller to allow us to employ a DVD writer, as SATA models are incredibly thin on the ground, and the two SATA ports come as a bonus. Who, you may wonder, could possibly want eight SATA ports? We have no idea. Similarly we are mystified by Intel's decision to ditch IDE support.

In our performance testing we used a 2.66GHz E6700 processor with 2GB of Corsair 8500 memory, a Sapphire Radeon X1900 XTX graphics card and a Western Digital Raptor 150GB hard drive and the Gigabyte performed flawlessly, however it was no better than comparable motherboards that use the older 975X chipset, which leaves us somewhat mystified.

This is a well designed motherboard with a decent list of features, but the new chipset seems to bring little or no benefit to the consumer and yet the price is uncomfortably high. If the price was slashed then our opinion would change dramatically, but as things stand the Gigabyte board has limited appeal.