- Back to homepage

Gigabyte P35-DS3R Intel Bearlake Motherboard

@ 2007/05/13

The overclocking on this board, factoring in the fact this is is a value-for-money variant series, is nothing short of stunning, Without any mods at all to the motherboard, it went to a sky-high FSB of 575MHz!! That's on a 4MB Cache Conroe Processor.

Comment from Rutar @ 2007/05/14

Performance might be crippled by the huge amount of useless ports integrated on the board, which is very uncool compared to the Offerings of Asus.

Comment from Kougar @ 2007/05/13

Sure thing! I'm pretty excited about these boards, as if that wasn't obvious. Hopefully prices will fall a good bit though, I'm not sure what approx MSRP is for any of them. Ironically the "C" DS3R is $189 @ ClubIT and is the cheapest of the lot for the moment. ClubIT also has the DS3R and DQ6 and P6K & P6K3 boards already up for several days.

Gigabyte used some fairly decent thermal compound on their NB sink, but I found that removing mine and using AS5 still helped, and using aftermarket chipset cooler meant I only needed to notch my chipset's vcore up a tiny notch. I expect that with aftermarket cooling, or even that heatpipe tower assembly that cools the PWM/VRM area as well will help overclocking results.

Comment from jmke @ 2007/05/13

good overview there Kougar, thanks!

Comment from Rutar @ 2007/05/13

I highly doubt that the others will clock better as the reviewer even used active cooling on the NB.

For my taste, I can't wait till we see decent cooling on cheaper boards as this is something everyone needs for stability and lifetime.

Comment from Kougar @ 2007/05/13

I was waiting for ya to post this one!

For any other Gigabyte DS3'ers here is a breakdown:

P35-DQ6
P35-DS4
P35-DS3P
P35-DS3R
P35C-DS3R

The "C" DS3R is identical except it offers 4 DDR2 slots and 2 DDR3 slots on the same board, for a total of 6 slots. The non-"C" DS3R does not have the 2 extra DDR3 slots.

DS3 type "R" boards only offer a single PCIe 16x slot and no firewire. All of the other boards offer firewire and 2 PCIe 16x slots in a 16x+4x config including the DQ6. Only the DQ6 and DS4 have the extensive "heatpipe towers" heatsink, while the DS3P has a cutdown version, and the "R" variants simply use a cheap extruded aluminum heatsink.

All these boards come with solid ferrite core capacitors, support 1333FSB, QuadCore processors, and offer future 45nm Penryn support.

If the cheapest/lowest end P35 board from Gigabyte can attain a 575 FSB, then I can't wait to see results from a P35-DQ6.

All information and graphics contained in Madshrimps are sole property of the Madshrimps crew and may not be reproduced or copied in any manner without written permission from us.