Pentium D 930 with Gigabyte GA-965GM-S2

The G965's memory controller shows slightly higher bandwidth then my overclocked Athlon 64 X2 is achieving with dual-channel DDR-400, however memory latency is significantly better on the Athlon due to the integrated memory controller. Still, that's an impressive reflection on this chipset and DDR2 RAM in particular. The memory used in these comparisons consisted of two 1 GB Patriot PC6400 CL5 sticks in the intel, and two 512 MB Corsair ValueSelect PC3200 CL2.5 sticks in the AMD.The integrated GMA X3000 video is perhaps the most hyped feature of the motherboard. With a core speed of 667 MHz and Shader Model 3.0 at launch, at least on paper, it sounds very impressive for onboard graphics. As this system is my HTPC I am using my old and trusty ATi All-In-Wonder VE for my graphics, mainly so I can watch and record TV. Because the All-In-Wonder is a PCI card, and partly because it is old technology, on the 3DMark2001 benchmark its score tops out around 3500 on the fastest host systems. How did the integrated GMA X3000 on the GA-965GM-S2 do in 3DMark2001? Approximately 5300 marks. Good for integrated video, but not as good as I had hoped for a video core with such a higher clock speed compared to the All-In-Wonder's currently overclocked speed of 310 MHz. This may have been an issue with intel's graphics drivers, and future tests may yield higher scores. The real beauty of the GMA X3000 video core is that it is deemed by intel as "Ready for Windows Vista". The onboard graphics support DirectX 10 and it meets the requirements for the full Aero experience. I do not yet have Windows Vista to test the onboard video to the metal, and as long as the All-In-Wonder is not supported by Vista then I don't see it coming to this system anytime soon