PCB Design

Although Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R mainboard is positioned as a mainstream solution, engineers paid special attention to stability and reliability issue when working on the PCB design. As a result, this product has been included into Ultra Durable 2 series. You can see it right away if you look at the CPU voltage regulator circuitry that has been designed according to new principles on this board.

Despite relatively low price of Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R, this mainboard comes with a six-channel CPU voltage regulator that is rarely used on inexpensive products. Besides, we would also like to give due credit to Gigabyte engineers for the component base of their solution: the processor voltage regulator as well as the rest of the mainboard PCB uses only solid-state capacitors with organic polymer electrolyte, ferrite core chokes and high-frequency Low RDS(on) MOSFETs. We were especially pleased to notice that the shift to more contemporary electronic components didn’t affect the price of the mainboard. At least, Gigabyte representatives promise so.

All components used on Gigabyte Ultra Durable 2 mainboards boast indisputable advantages compared with traditional transistors, capacitors and coils. Namely, these components increase significantly the reliability of the processor voltage regulator, reduce the heat dissipation, and minimize the energy losses, i.e. increase the performance index of the voltage regulator in nominal operation mode as well as during overclocking. The new voltage regulator circuitry allows giving up heatsinks and ensures low level of heat dissipation.

Speaking of the components cooling, I would like to say that the chipset North Bridge has no active cooler. P35 GMCH chip is topped with a passive aluminum heatsink of medium size and golden color. This cooling appears more than enough in this case: although P35 North Bridge is manufactured with 90nm process, it boasts comparatively low heat dissipation that never exceeds 16W. By the way, P35 is the today’s most economical chipset for LGA775 processors.

As for the ICH9 South Bridge on Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R, it is covered with a small aluminum pin-heatsink, also of nice golden color.

The area around the LGA775 socket looks pretty spacious. The new processor voltage regulator circuitry doesn’t use massive components. As a result, Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R can accommodate almost any CPU cooler. However, there is one thing to keep in mind: the reverse side of the PCB. Unfortunately, there are some “through” components around the processor socket, so the pins you see on the reverse side of the PCB may hinder installation of some cooler backplates, or worst case, the contacts can get closed by metal backplates of the processor coolers.

All in all, the PCB design is quite rational. All major slots and connectors are pretty optimally distributed over the PCB surface. Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R installation into the system case should be an easy task for anyone.

However, you know us, we will always find something to complain about. In this case we were a little bit upset with the location of the Clear CMOS jumper, which is placed too close to the PCI Express x16 slot. As a result, you will hardly be able to Clear CMOS using this jumper if there is a graphics card with dual-slot cooling system installed. Although at the same time I have to defend the mainboard designers by saying that luckily, you will hardly ever need to use this jumper: the mainboard resets to defaults automatically, if the system wouldn’t boot after too extreme overclocking attempt.

The mainboard back panel carries pretty standard set of connectors, considering that Gigabyte engineers provide support even for older devices. Therefore, you can see a Serial and Parallel ports that have long been abandoned by other mainboard makers. Besides that there are four USB 2.0 ports, a Gigabit network connector, P/S connectors for keyboard and mouse, an optical and coaxial SPDIF ports, and six analog audio-jacks for sound equipment.