PCB Design

Gigabyte P35C-DS3R mainboard belongs to the Ultra Durable 2 series – this is what the “D” in the name stands for. It means that despite relatively low price, this mainboard is built with new type of electronic components and chips that ensure higher reliability and longer life of the end product.

You can see it clearly from the fact that Gigabyte P35C-DS3R uses only solid-state capacitors with organic polymer electrolyte made in Japan and ferrite core chokes.

The second distinguishing feature of the Ultra Durable 2 series is the six-channel processor voltage regulator circuitry built with high-frequency Low RDS(on) MOSFET. This circuitry design ensures not only longer lifetime, but also higher efficiency of the voltage regulator and lower operational temperatures. By the way, this is exactly the reason why the processor voltage regulator on Gigabyte P35C-DS3R has no heatsinks: it simply doesn’t get hot.

Another peculiarity of the processor voltage regulator is the fact that it is being powered from the 4-pin 12V power supply connector. By the way, you will not be able to use an 8-pin connector in it, because the coil located very close to it won’t let you plug it in.

Chipset micro-chips on the inexpensive Gigabyte P35C-DS3R are cooled down with regular aluminum heatsinks of golden color. They are actually more than enough to ensure proper cooling of the North and South Bridge of the chipset, but nevertheless they heat up quite tangibly during work. Therefore, feel free to replace the North Bridge cooler or top it with an additional fan. As for the South Bridge, you will hardly be able to modify its cooling system in any way, because it appears to be right underneath the installed graphics card, which leaves you no room for invention.

Luckily, the P35C-DS3R mainboard has no sophisticated cooling system that Gigabyte typically puts on all its high-end mainboards these days and that doesn’t allow installing most of the high-end processor air-coolers. As a result, Gigabyte P35C-DS3R can accommodate almost any CPU cooling system easily. There is a lot of room around the LGA775 socket and no components get in the way.

However, it wasn’t all so rosy. There are a few pins sticking out on the reverse side of the mainboard PCB next to the processor socket, which may prevent you from mounting some of the cooler backplates.

As for the overall PCB layout, it made a slightly strange impression. The board is pretty large, there are not too many components on it, but the lower right corner of the PCB is not utilized at all. Therefore, we were a little bit disappointed with the location of the PATA and SATA ports for hard disk drives. Moreover, Clear CMOS jumper also falls right underneath the installed graphics card, and you need to be able to reach it to shift from DDR2 to DDR3 SDRAM.

The mainboard connector panel carries pretty standard set of connectors and ports, considering the Gigabyte engineers make sure that their solutions still support most of the older devices. Therefore, we can see a Serial and Parallel port that most of other mainboard makers have long given up. Besides that there are four USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit network port, PS/2 ports for keyboard and mouse, optical and coaxial SPDIF ports and six analog audio-jacks for sound equipment.