Gigabyte P35-DS3R Intel Bearlake Motherboard
 

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.

http://www.vr-zone.com/?i=4966&s=1

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. :)

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.

good overview there Kougar, thanks!

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.

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.