Gigabyte has been on a win streak as of late. Their latest 965 chipset boards are great performers and overclocks to no end, bringing the tried and true Intel chipset to the performance level those enthusiasts are looking for. They even decided to fine tune an already great performing board with the release of the Pentium certified until Intel hasn’t any boards supporting the Intel core 2 Duo’s couple weeks ago. So where does a company go once they tweak every ounce of performance possible from a chipset? Why, a new chipset of course! Today, we want to introduce to you the Gigabyte P35-DS3R motherboard, which sports the new Intel P35 chipset.
But being a being of late chipset for now the older LGA775 socket motherboard for the Intel core 2 Duo processors, they still have a good life over them being a much cheaper alternative with the memory use with the DDR2 memory and a semi-support of crossfire graphics with dual graphics card with the second being limited to 8x speed.
With a quick glance at the board, you can see the Gigabyte decied to remain with the blue-green color of the PCB that they have come to be known for. I know that is all subjective, but I kind of like this color, and it does make Gigabyte boards easy to spot! A quick glance at the board also makes it easy to see that it is just a tad smaller than a lot of other boards. Gigabyte packed a lot into this board though. Let’s get an up-close view!The bottom right of the board is where we find our eight SATA connectors, which are all SATA2 compliant. Next to the SATA connetors, we have our Southbridge, which comes in the form of Intel’s newest ICH9R chipset. This chipset has an aluminum heatsink on it, and it did become quite warm as we ran the board under normal circumstances. Just under the SATA connectors, we have our lone IDE connector. Under the IDE connector, we have our front panal connector pins, which are colored to help the user with ease of setup. Here is just a little closer look at the pins.
First of all, the Gigabyte P35-DS3R disappointed us with its results in our testing. It scored at pretty much the same levels, or even a little lower than most of the other boards represented in our testing. It surprised us just a little to see this, and we hope that some BIOS tweaks will help with this.The bundle that came with the board was adaquate. Nothing flashy, but certainly also not to thin to leave you running out the door to get to a local computer shop to pick up an item or two that you need to have to even get the board running.
