BIOS

The mainboard was tested with the BIOS version F3 dating back to May 14.

The BIOS of Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R mainboard is based on Award microcode. Nevertheless, it differs slightly from the traditional Award based BIOS, the developers have made a few noticeable changes to it. Among the positive changes I would like to mention the Q-Flash utility that allows reflashing the BIOS without booting the operating system.

The Q-Flash utility seems to be the only feature making the work with Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R mainboard easier. Other innovations introduced in the BIOS Setup are quite arguable, in my opinion. One of the most frustrating one is the fact that some important memory controller configuration settings are “hidden” in the BIOS Setup. You can see these settings and get access to them only by pressing a “secret combination” of keys in the main menu of BIOS Setup. The combination is Ctrl+F1, but unfortunately, there is no mention of it anywhere, even in the mainboard user’s manual.

As for the actual settings offered by the BIOS Setup of Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R mainboard, the most interesting ones are singled out in MB Intelligent Tweaker section (M.I.T.).

This section contains all options that have anything to do with overclocking and allow adjusting processor clock frequency multipluier (reducing it below the nominal value), managing the processor bus frequency within the range from 100 to 700MHz, managing PCI Express bus frequency between 90 and 150MHz.

Here you can also change the memory frequency using the FSB dividers. Intel P35 chipset offers relatively small set of FSB:MEM dividers including 1:1, 5:6, 4:5, 2:3, 5:8, 3:5 and 1:2. You can set any of these dividers in the BIOS Setup of the Gigabyte board.

Note that these are increasing dividers, i.e. the memory frequency on Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R mainboard may be higher or equal to that of the system bus.

Next to the frequency settings there are a couple of interesting options such as High Speed DRAM DLL Settings and Performance Enhance. The manufacturer claims that they allow balancing between system stability and better overclocking potential. However, we didn’t manage to reveal any practical effect of these settings on the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R performance in the nominal and overclocked modes.

When it comes to voltage adjustment, the mainboard offers the following settings:

Note that Gigabyte hides all absolute voltage values with the exception of processor Vcore. Even system monitoring cannot track down the actual voltage values, reporting only OK or Fail. This is a frustrating drawback.

In this respect I would like to thank the developers at least for showing the actual temperatures and fan rotation speeds in the PC Health Status section of BIOS Setup. By the way, the board supports Smart Fan technology that controls the fan rotation speeds depending on the temperature readings.

Memory timings on Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R can only be adjusted when you access the hidden settings by pressing Ctrl+F1.

The available options give you access to all major timings except Command Rate. Intel P35, just like iP965, doesn’t grant access to this parameter that is why it is always set to 2T on the mainboard we are reviewing today.