Hardware Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2007/06/01/gigabyte_ga-p35-ds3r/1

Don't want to spent £150 on the latest motherboard? Are cheap boards not worth the PCB they're made on, or is there occasionally a diamond in the rough? The Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R may be light on features but does it still pack that Gigabyte punch? Read on to find out...

 

YEAH Gigabyte .. I love them .. They soon will show up a kikcass one .

 

Very good board for the money. And finally something that saves power!

 

Looks like a great board for the cash, not a bad overclocker too - especially on an early BIOS. Great board all-round by the sounds.

 

One issue with the Gigabyte boards are installing large heatsinks on the CPU quite often block out the first two memory slots ( I know that the Scythe Infiniti does this)

Otherwise it looks like a nice little board!

 

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Might work daan in Lunnon, but it don't rub ere.

 

hmmmm...i seem to not be able to find the price.....

 

Mankz, if it does on the Giga, it would do on many other boards.

DXR - About £90

 

Looks good - most of the features you'll need and cuts out the ones people rarely need to keep the price keen. Who really needs dual ethernet? And why waste the money on dual PCI-E x16 slots if you don't intend to use Crossfire/SLi or have some exotic RAID solution? Definitely this board is a contender.

My only gripe is the IDE socket - does it HAVE to be there, where, in a normal ATX configuration with optical drives at the top, it will require some careful cable management (and, in a big case, a long IDE cable) to reach the drives without fouling the SATA ports or some other part of the board. Why not hack off the floppy port and put the IDE there? I know there are a lot of factors (trace length etc.) to consider in laying out a board, and I'm sure the Gigabyte designers have their reasons, but surely they could at least have put the connector vertically on the edge of the board rather than horizontally right below the SATA ports?

 

The problem is people STILL use bloody floppy drives for SATA installations with XP etc. It's stupid really, but with a budget board you still need one. The IDE socket at the bottom is a bit of a sod, yes, but you can always put your optical drives at the bottom of your 5.25" slots in a standard tower. Horizontal is a PITA though, you're right.

 

OOps, sorry forgot to say the thin boards (thinner than normal ATX)

 

True, I forget that some people don't know how to slipstream a SATA driver so still use floppy drives (though I thought SATA 2 controllers tended to work with XP without drivers, albeit without the full speed and feature set of SATA 2??). Maybe they could have swapped the floppy and IDE ports around, however. Any road, it's a small gripe that can easily be overcome through judicious cable routing and drive placement. If only SATA optical drives were more prevalent, we could finally get rid of the need for IDE altogether.

 

If you want to install to a native SATA controller using a single SATA drive, there's no problem with XP because most mobo BIOSes allow you to set the SATA ports to "IDE mode". This basically does what it says on the tin - it disguises the SATA ports as generic ATA ports so that you can install XP without needing drivers.

If you're using a third party SATA controller, or even wanting to install Windows XP to a RAID on a native SATA controller, you need drivers.

 

i don't think we are going to see the end of either for quite some time

A lot of people still use ATA drives, so getting rid of them is going to cost money (or a SATA adaptor which requires a power cable and costs like £15)

As to slip streaming windows, firstly, you need a computer running to do that, and secondly, it takes some time to do that, is it faster to rip the disc to your HDD, add your drivers, recompile and burn
or is it faster to plug in a FDD

 

Is that a new one?

At first I was like this board sucks, look at the benchmarks, then I noticed it was running a E6300 VS those QX6800s. Now, I'm amazed. If it had SLi I'd have bought it in a second.

 

nice article once again
Will you be reviewing the P35-DS4 model anytime soon? I'm not quite sure the difference (in value and features) between getting one of the DS3 models or the DS4. thx

 

Inexpensive boards are tailored for people who spend less on upgrading. These people are the least likely to have SATA optical drives. This is also the reason for including parallel and serial ports which should have been lost LONG ago.

The IDE port is linked to the Gigabyte chipset, because it's not native to the ICH9 southbridge, so it's far easier for the designers to put it down there

Ninja edit: completemadness got it right

Matt: We did it because it's unrepresentative to just drop in an X6800 for a budget board. It also helps people judge what CPU to buy showing the top and bottom end depending on what they do mostly.

Kei: Depends what Gigabyte choose to send us and if it's really any different making a full article. I could spend forever looking at all the different Gigabyte P35 iterations I should expect the performance is little different, the DS4 usually only offers extra features, where the DQ6 is tailored for overclocking and performance.