X-bit labs

Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L (rev. 1.0) Mainboard Review (page 2)

Category: Mainboards

by Doors4ever

[ 01/04/2008 | 04:36 PM ]

Mainboards featuring Silent-Pipe heatpipe cooling system for chipset cooling acquire an additional S-word and can be called S4 instead of S3. However, if the heatpipes are used only to cool down the chipset North Bridge, the board will still belong to the S3 series. For example, GA-P35-DS3P.

By the way, the letter P in the GA-P35-DS3P may have emerged from the word “pair”, as these boards feature two PCI Express x16 slots. They belong to the top of S3 series and use South Bridge chips with RAID support, just like the mainboards with the letter R in the end of their model name. For example, GA-P35- DS3R.

Intel P35 Express chipset is known to support both: DDR2 and DDR3 and Gigabyte mainboards that can work with these both memory types acquire an additional letter C after the chipset name that may have come from the word “combo”. For example, GA-P35C-DS3.

The mainboards working with the new DDR3 SDRAM have been singled out into an individual group with the letter T following the chipset name that comes from the word “three”. For example, GA-P35T-DS3P.

Of course, this naming system cannot reflect the entire variety of mainboard models out there. It doesn’t take into account additional onboard controllers, such as IEEE1394, number of Serial ATA channels, rear panel connectors, but it is nevertheless more efficient than the model names some other mainboard makers use for their solutions. Gigabyte’s mainboard names give us a pretty good idea of the mainboard functionality.

Today we are going to talk about one of the simplest Gigabyte mainboards on Intel P35 Express chipset – GA-P35-DS3L. Letter L may stand for the word “Lite”.