by Doors4ever
05/16/2008 | 05:24 PM
We have already discussed multiple times all sorts of problems that contemporary computer industry is suffering from these days. We can be as happy as we like about high consumer qualities of Intel processors, but we can’t overlook the fact that the absence of decent competition from AMD is already telling and will have an even greater effect in the future. One of the obvious examples is the postponed mss production of 45nm quad-core Yorkfield processors. Of course, this change of plans could have been caused by the existing problems and urgent need to eliminate them in the new processor stepping. However, numerous analysts assume that the real reason lies with the new quad-core AMD processors that turned out unable to compete even with the old 65nm Kentsfield. There was simply no worthy rival to the new Yorkfield CPUs that is why they could be painlessly postponed.
<%BANNER[article]%>The situation in the graphics card market is just as good, even if we put the eternal rivalry of two graphics giants aside. While the CPU makers do everything they can to increase the performance at the same or even lower power consumption level, graphics accelerators develop extensively: each new flagship solution here requires even more power then the previous one. At the same time, we still couldn’t play Crysis with maximum quality settings, because none of the existing graphics cards could cope with this task. Moreover, nothing seems to be changing this situation in the near future. So, our only hope is that Larrabee will calm then all down a little bit.
If you are looking to build a high-performance platform, ASUS mainboards are almost a complete analogue of remarkable Intel CPUs that have almost no alternatives in the market these days. It is really cool that anyone can find an ASUS mainboard to suit their needs. But is there a worthy alternative to them? Unfortunately, our experience suggests that other manufacturers’ solutions may offer us a few selected advantages, but we will still have to sacrifice something: features, comfort or even operational stability. And no matter how great ASUS mainboards are, they are not ideal and still have their own drawbacks.
The method of exclusion suggests that the only mainboard manufacturer that can challenge ASUS on equal terms these days is Gigabyte. Only Gigabyte can compete with ASUS in all aspects of mainboard making: production volume, dealer network, technical support, rich product range, extensive features and functionality of their products. Now we have to do only one thing: find that ideal Gigabyte mainboard.
In the beginning of this year we shared our thoughts on what the abbreviations in Gigabyte’s mainboard names stand for in our review. Since none of our readers, nor Gigabyte officials corrected us, our thoughts turned out correct. So, not even knowing anything about the product we can already state the following judging only by its name - Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4:
The marking has been almost completely decoded, however, there is still one more letter that needs an explanation: E (GA-EP35-DS4)? It might me an abbreviation from the word Energy. New Gigabyte mainboards contribute to saving the planet by supporting DES (Dynamic Energy Saver) technology. We have already told you recently about it in our article devoted to Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6 mainboard. The user can control the number of active phases in the processor voltage regulator circuitry with the help of Dynamic Energy Saver Utility, which allows saving the power. I believe there are no other differences from “regular” Gigabyte mainboards. The name - Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 – written on a sticker is another indirect proof of that:
If you remove the sticker carefully, you will understand that this board is based on the regular GA-P35-DS4 without the “E” in the name:
Do not forget that Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4 mainboards have developed significantly since their launch. The first 1.0 revision was replaced with revision 1.1, then we saw revision 2.0 and recently they launched the latest revision 2.1. Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 mainboard is based on the latest PCB revision 2.1.
When it comes to package design there are two extremes. The first one is minimalism. Minimal design, minimal info, at best the product name is printed on some sticker on the side of the box, but sometimes the only way to find out what it is, is to actually open the package. Take, for example, the boxes from DFI mainboards or Thermalright coolers. To be fair I have to admit that these are pretty rare occasions. You will much more often come across computer components packaging that suffers from a different extreme: superfluous design. The company and model names are often lost against luxurious buxom ladies with all sorts of cold steel, fire arms or laser weapons; scary monsters, race cards or space ships. Extreme colors and fantastic themes seem more adequate for a toy store than for a computer one.
Luckily, Gigabyte Company managed to stay away from both extremes. The most important thing is still the info, while numerous photos and pictures do not distract, but serve their main purpose: illustrate the words. At the same time, Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 package is still very colorful:
The company name, the name of the series and model number, the mainboard photo with highlighted key features, the list o supported technologies and a brief description of the most important ones, according to Gigabyte’s marketing department, - all this found its place on the Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 package. Everything is written in English, of course, but there is the same info in 16 other languages as well on one of the sides.
By the way, Gigabyte pays special attention to local documentation, too. You won’t find any weird sounding machine-translated texts – only well-written and grammatically correct wording. The number of languages they have Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 user’s manual in is really impressive:
Overall, Gigabyte’s effort here deserves the highest possible score. At least, the info on Gigabyte’s box will certainly keep you busy for a while.
As for the accessories bundle, Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 doesn’t come with anything unusual. There are FDD and IDE cables, four Serial ATA cables with locks, I/O Shield for the case rear panel and a few stickers with Gigabyte logo:
By the way, note that one pair of SATA cables has an L-shaped connector, while another one – a regular straight connector. You can decide yourself which connector type is more convenient for you. I love it when they pay so much attention to the little things!
Besides, the bundle also includes a bracket with two eSATA ports and a four-pin power connector, a power cable with an adapter for SATA HDD and an eSATA cable.
All these devices allow connecting not only an external eSATA disk that usually uses its own individual power source, but also a regular SATA HDD.
The last in this accessories list is the mainboard user manual with a CD disk containing all drivers and utilities, a guide to Intel boxed cooler installation and a poster with brief assembly instructions in several languages:
You may get the impression that this is a not very rich accessories bundle, but if you look at the mainboard rear panel with all the ports and connectors a contemporary user might ever need, you will realize that there is nothing else you can actually wish for:
By the way, eight USB ports on the rear panel seems to be a sort of a record these days. With this extensive variety of ports, you do not need any additional brackets, trust me.
So, the mainboard package and accessories made a great impression and certainly score high. However, these are all secondary details that do not determine the final verdict really. So, let’s take a closer look at the Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 mainboard layout and features.
Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 looks not just good, but terrific:
Thanks to Ultra Durable 2 technology, the six-phase processor voltage regulator uses only high-quality components that are more efficient and dissipate less heat. The board is built only with solid-state capacitors. The 8- and 24-pin power connectors are very conveniently located, just like the FDD connector. There are five fan connectors on the board, two of them (including the CPU one) are four-pin connectors. The gap between the two PCI Express x16 slots is bigger than usual. The installed graphics card will block the DIMM slot clips, but I would consider it an insignificant drawback at this point.
They used color coded connectors, placed the IDE port horizontally for extra convenience, found a spot for an additional FireWire connector and even thought about implementing LPT and COM as pin-connectors, although you will need to find rear panel brackets for them.
Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 mainboard seems to have simply no drawbacks at all, however, we would like to make a few comments about the Silent-Pipe chipset cooler.
First of all, it will be really hard to install or remove certain CPU coolers, because the processor socket is surrounded by heatpipes and heatsinks around three sides. It is certainly a drawback, but we all know that efficient and quiet cooling requires larger heat dissipating surface area. This is the only reason why we still put up with numerous bulky heatsinks they install onto mainboards these days. So, you should keep in mind that the board may be incompatible with some processor coolers, although we will not call it a drawback, because it was done for our own good.
However, let’s take a closer look at the chipset cooling system. It starts with a small heatsink on top of the chipset South Bridge. It is not just a heat-spreader, not a plate pressing against the heatpipe that should transfer the heat somewhere else. It is a fully-fledged heatsink (though a small one) that does contribute to the chipset cooling.
The heatpipes starts at this heatsink and then goes to a larger one on the chipset North Bridge. And this is where the first questions emerge. As you can see, two next heatpipes start at the top of the North Bridge heatsink:
One is very short: it ends in the first heatsink on MOSFET transistors:
Another one goes through the groove in the first heatsink only touching it slightly and ends in the second one.
So, these two heatpipes will perform their cooling functions, but they only transfer the heat that will get to them through thin plates of the North Bridge heatsink. The main heat burden, however, will be distributed between the two chipset heatsinks, one of which is pretty tiny. So, did they really have to put together this entire bulky system of four heatsinks creating a lot of problems for some large processor coolers, if only two of these heatsinks actually work at their full potential?
Please get me right: we can’t say that MOSFET heatsinks do not work or are useless. Gigabyte mainboards and Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 in particular use very aggressive algorithm for processor fan rotation speed management. The fan of our Zalman CNPS9700 LED cooler didn’t work at all most of the time. With hardly any airflow, this entire cooling system heats up a lot, including the MOSFET heatsinks. Once the fan kicks in, their temperature drops down dramatically, but the heatpipe connecting the chipset heatsinks remains burning hot, under any circumstances, i.e. the chipset is always running in extreme thermal conditions.
All in al, this cooling system is pretty good, but it would be nice to have at least one heatpipe go to the base of the chipset North Bridge heatsink, so that the heat could be immediately transferred away from the hottest component and dissipated through additional heatsinks on MSFET transistors. As for the heatpipe coming from the South Bridge, it can be left at the base, may continue farther, may be lifted higher – any technologically suitable solution will do. I am sure Gigabyte engineers can figure it out.
Besides the problems with the chipset cooling system we have just mentioned, Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 doesn’t have any other drawbacks. Just check out the components layout scheme and you will undoubtedly agree with me:
We would like to wind up our discussion of Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 exterior design and functionality with the technical specifications list:
Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 mainboard uses very common looking BIOS based on Award-Phoenix micro-code. However, Gigabyte engineers expanded and adapted some of its features and functions for their particular mainboard in a very creative way.
Gigabyte mainboards used to have a few unpleasant issues. For example, they hid some of the important BIOS settings, so that many users had really hard times finding them. to get full access to the entire list of available BIOS features, you had to press Ctrl-F1 from the main menu. Now this key combination provides only a few additional options in the Integrated Peripherals and PnP/PCI Configurations sections.
First of all, let’s check out Advanced BIOS Features page for two very good reasons. In our recent review of ASRock 4Core1600P35-WiFi+ mainboard we pointed out that it could automatically boot from a
Unfortunately, we couldn’t get it to work, and the board wouldn’t boot from a USB flash drive automatically. Like on many other mainboards, you have to connect the USB drive to the system to be detected, then access the BIOS and set it as the first boot-up device. Or you have to press Esc on boot-up to access the boot menu and select the desired device manually.
The second reason, why we paid special attention to Advanced BIOS Features page is the CPU parameters that other mainboards often have singled out into a separate CPU Features section or placed closer to the page with overclocking friendly functions. There is nothing wrong with these parameters being placed into Advanced BIOS Features section, as they are not changed that frequently anyway. Only one of them – CPU EIST Function – caused us some problems. This parameter deals with power-saving technologies, such as Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology and is enabled by default. If we change the processor clock frequency multiplier, these power-saving technologies get disabled and even the CPU EIST Function parameter disappears from the Advanced BIOS Features section.
At this point, there is nothing wrong, but the problems appear when we return the processor clock frequency multiplier to its default value. CPU EIST Function appears again, but this time it is Disabled. The problem is that we change the multiplier in the MB Intelligent Tweaker section, and the CPU EIST Function should be enabled in a completely different section – Advanced BIOS Features. It would be rally great if at least one CPU EIST Function parameter could be moved to the MB Intelligent Tweaker (M.I.T) section, otherwise you can simply forget to change it back.
Let’s move on. The next section we will discuss is PC Health Status. It has been significantly improved compared with what we saw on other Gigabyte mainboards. However, it could be even better, as there is certainly no limit to perfection :)
Now we see actual voltages instead of OK or Fail that hardly mean anything. Among them are processor Vcore and Vmem, and the memory voltage has been increased to 2.1V. We didn’t do it manually, it is simply the default voltage for our Corsair Dominator TWIN2X2048-9136C5D, as written in the modules SPD. Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 mainboard read it from the SPD and set in the BIOS. However, overclockers wouldn’t mind also having the current North Bridge voltage and temperature readings, too.
Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 mainboard can control rotation speed of four fans out of five that can be connected to it. It is also great. You can enable failure alarm for three of these fans, but you can actually adjust the rotation speed of only one processor fan.
This is indeed the most important fan in the system. The temperature inside the system case changes slowly and gradually, so it is important but not obligatory to have the option to adjust rotation speed of case fans. Only the processor temperature can double in a matter of seconds from the safe 35°С to the dangerous 70°С once the workload increases. That is why we only have two choices: to constantly maintain the cooling efficiency at the maximum, or to adjust it depending on the processor temperature at the given moment of time. Gigabyte mainboards are among those few boards that can still adjust the rotation speed of the processor fan even if it only has a three-pin connector. It is a great advantage that can determine our decision in favor of Gigabyte’s mainboard over a solution from some other manufacturer. However, there is still room for improvement.
As we have already mentioned, by default all Gigabyte mainboards use very aggressive algorithm for processor fan rotation speed management. It usually doesn’t even start upon boot-up. As a result, the fanless chipset cooling system heats up tremendously without additional airflow from the CPU cooler. It is more or less acceptable for nominal work modes, but becomes pretty dangerous during overclocking with increased voltage. You can use some utilities to change the adjustment algorithm parameters, but it would be much more convenient to have the settings available to us from the mainboard BIOS. In this case the “correct” adjustment mode will kick in right after the system boots, and not when we load the OS and launch the appropriate utilities.
As for the adjustment of other fans rotation speed, it is not a must, but it would be nice to have around. And we don’t really need the complicated connections between the temperature and fan rotation speeds. All we need is the option to set the fans rotation speed at a few given levels, for example from 60% to 100% with a 10% increment. It could be much easier to implement. In this case any user could find the best operational mode for all other fans in the system, such as case fans, for instance.
Now it is time for us to dwell on excellent (no exaggeration here) features of the overclocker section called MB Intelligent Tweaker (M.I.T). It allows changing frequencies, dividers, multipliers, timings and voltages. This section is very easy to work with, very illustrative. It is so thoroughly designed that unlike other BIOS sections, there is hardly anything to improve here. Just look at the list of available parameters, their names, their convenient grouping and the use of highlighting to indicate higher settings, and you will see what I mean:
Only slightly cut-down features compared with flagship Gigabyte products may disappoint you a tiny bit. For example, there is no way to change Command Rate 1T/2T among the available timings:
Parameter | Supported range |
CAS Latency Time | 3 – 6 |
DRAM RAS# to CAS# Delay | 1 – 15 |
DRAM RAS# Precharge | 1 – 15 |
Precharge Delay (tRAS) | 1 – 63 |
ACT to ACT Delay (tRRD) | 1 – 15 |
Rank Write to Read Delay | 1 – 31 |
Write to Precharge Delay | 1 – 31 |
Refresh to ACT Delay | 0 – 255 |
Read to Precharge Delay | 1 – 15 |
Static tRead Value | 1 – 31 |
Static tRead Phase Adjust | 1 – 31 |
Also, the mainboard installed the strange timings like on the photo above by default: 5-7-7-14. Sometimes it would read the SPD correctly and claim that it would set the timings to 5-5-5-18, but after Windows booted the timings turned out still to be set at 5-7-7-24. However, this is not a serious issue: if you give up automatic timings setting and change them manually, the problem will go away.
However, when the CPU is running at its nominal speeds, the mainboard sets the memory frequency at 1066MHz instead of 800MHz, like many other would do. You can set the memory frequency even higher if you wish and if your memory can support higher speed, because the list of available multipliers for FSB:Mem ratio is pretty long. For our processor it included the following multipliers: 2.0, 2.4, 3.2, 3.33, 4.0, 2.5, 3.0. And you won’t need to calculate the resulting memory frequency yourself, because there is a special parameter called Memory frequency that will display the current as well as the resulting memory frequency for you.
However, the greatest thing is that the modest Static tRead Value parameter in fact offers you to set the desired Performance Level manually. Performance Enhance parameter initially set to Turbo should better be changed to Standard during overclocking that is why during our test session we could even see Performance Level of 13, which is very high. The lower the Performance Level, the higher the speed. So, it is extremely important to be able to manually adjust Performance Level to hit high speeds. As far as we know, only ASUS, DFI and Gigabyte mainboards currently offer this option.
One more drawback we could point out at this point, is smaller supported voltage intervals compared with top Gigabyte mainboards. However, a lot of mainboard maker would do the same thing, otherwise no one would buy their expensive top products any more, if everything were also available on a more mainstream solution. Nevertheless, Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 offers enough voltage settings with sufficient supported ranges for successful CPU overclocking.
Parameter | Supported range |
CPU Voltage Control | 0.7 - 2.35 V |
DDR2 OverVoltage Control | Up to +1.55 V |
PCI-E OverVoltage Control | Up to +0.35 V |
FSB OverVoltage Control | Up to +0.35 V |
(G)MCH OverVoltage Control | Up to +0.375 V |
Of course, we could ask Gigabyte to display the voltage in absolute units, like the processor Vcore, and not in relative units, like all other voltages. Voltage in volts makes much more sense. You really feel the responsibility when you set 1.5V for the chipset North Bridge instead of the default 1.25V. However, it is much easier psychologically to just add +0.25V, although it will still result into the same 1.5V.
I would also like to say that only ASUS and Gigabyte mainboard feature a BIOS reflashing tool built into the BIOS itself. You can launch Q-Flash utility on Gigabyte mainboards by pressing F8 from the main menu. It is very easy to work with thanks to intuitive graphics interface, and reflashing the BIOS directly from the BIOS Setup seems to be safer than doing it from Windows OS.
Like many other contemporary mainboards, Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 can save BIOS settings in profiles and load them upon request. You can save the profiles by pressing F11 and load them by pressing F12 from the main BIOS menu. This time we cannot actually compare the implementation of this feature with the same on ASUS mainboards. Gigabyte mainboards have it implemented way better. First of all, you can save much more profiles. Second, you can provide each and every one of them with a detailed description. Third, after each successful system restart, it saves the current settings automatically and counts all successful boot-ups, so that you could return to the latest operational settings at any time.
All the criticism we shared here doesn’t all mean that Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 mainboard BIOS has issues. On the contrary, this BIOS is so good that we only want to make it even better and that’s why we shared some optimization ideas. However, we have already seen quite a few times how great theoretical features fail during immediate practical experiments. So, now it is definitely the time for us to check Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 out during actual overclocking tests.
Our open testbed was built with the following components:
The first part of our overclocking experiments on Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 mainboard was performed with an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 CPU (3.0GHz, FSB 333MHz, 6MB, Wolfdale, rev. C0). This processor can be overclocked to 4.1GHz frequency with Vcore increase and FSB set at 455MHz. Of course, any good mainboard can cope with this task. That is why we decided to lower relatively high clock frequency multiplier of this CPU – x9 – and try to find out the maximum bus frequency for our mainboard to remain stable. We know for a fact that this processor sample will not limit our overclocking up until 540MHz FSB.
This time the processor clock frequency multiplier was set to the minimal value of x6, and so was the memory frequency. We did it to ensure that neither CPU nor the memory would become a bottleneck and prevent us from finding out what our mainboard was actually capable of. CPU Voltage Control was increased to 1.3V, DDR2 OverVoltage Control was set at 2.1V, FSB OverVoltage Control and MCH OverVoltage Control were set as +0.2V.
We tried starting at 520MHz FSB wit these settings and succeeded. We decided to check the stability at this sped later and proceeded to conquering 530MHz FSB. However, in vain, as the mainboard started but couldn’t boot Windows. Increasing the voltage of the chipset North Bridge and FSB bus by +0.35V didn’t help hit even 525MHz. But we were really puzzled to discover that when we got back to 520MHz FSB, the board wasn’t working at this speed either!
Looks like the mainboard lost its ability to boot Windows OS at 520MHz FSB once we messed with FSB OverVoltage Control and MCH OverVoltage Control parameters. So which one is the one to blame? Further experiments revealed that increasing one or both these parameters by +0.3V or higher was very harmful for overclocking: the mainboard immediately lost stability. The maximum harmless value for both these parameters is +0.25V.
At the same time we discovered that Gigabyte didn’t cure one of their older issues: the mainboard would still reset all parameters without notifying the user in case of over-overclocking. We didn’t have to Clear CMOS even once, the board didn’t hang or freeze, didn’t loop on boot-up. The protection against over-overclocking worked perfectly well: every time the board detected over-overclocking it immediately rebooted with the FSB and memory settings dropped to their nominal values. Moreover, we didn’t have to waste our time trying to reboot with non-operational settings for a few additional times (usually, three times): parameters were reset immediately after the first failed boot-up.
Well, things seem to be perfect, but there is one unpleasant issue. Gigabyte mainboards do not notify you that the FSB and memory frequencies have been reset to their nominal values and just continue booting. It would be much better if the boards didn’t act willfully, but stopped, informed the user of reset settings and waited for the user’s response, like other manufacturers’ mainboards do. The user may continue booting with the default settings, or access BIOS Setup and correct the reset parameters. I assure Gigabyte engineers that in most cases the users will prefer the latter option, and not the former one.
So, Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 can boot the OS at 520MHz FSB with the processor clock multiplier lowered to x6. However, this achievement is of pure theoretical interest to us. The most important thing is to find all possible multiplier and bus frequency combinations when the mainboard can guarantee maximum overclocking and stable functioning of our processor at 4.1GHz.
As a result, Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 mainboard coped very well with overclocking our Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 to the maximum possible frequency of 4.1GHz with the default x9 multiplier. The FSB frequency in this case was raised to 455MHz, and the voltage of the chipset North Bridge and FSB were increased by +0.25V. With lower FSB OverVoltage Control and MCH OverVoltage Control settings the mainboard would often reset all parameters as we have just described above.
We encountered no problems when we reduced the clock multiplier to x8.5: the board remained stable at 483MHz FSB. However once we dropped it to x8, first problems occurred. To hit 4.1GHz frequency with this multiplier we have to increase the bus speed to 512-513MHz. However, Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 mainboard could only work stably at 500MHz, not any higher. Not too good for a CPU that can work at 540MHz FSB.
Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 also didn’t impress us with overclocking results for the youngest quad-core 45nm CPU - Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 (2.5GHz, FSB 333MHz, 6MB, Yorkfield, rev. M1). We could only achieve stability at 455MHz FSB. This is not bad of course, but still pretty average. Frankly speaking, we expected Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 to do much better than that.
There are a few possible reasons for not very high overclocking potential revealed by Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 mainboard. The most widely spread and the most common one is BIOS imperfection. We did use the latest available BIOS version at the time of tests – BIOS F3, which is one of the first ones. So hopefully they will address the issues in the upcoming BIOS revisions. It is possible, but we should keep in mind that although Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 is a new mainboard, it uses 2.1 PCB revision and the long-term experience of the same boards without the “E” in the model name. It seems more probable that this board is simply not very good at overclocking 45nm CPUs that appeared not that long ago.
Of course, we could also hold Silent-Pipe chipset cooling system accountable for our not very impressive overclocking experience, because it fails to provide sufficient cooling for the chipset North Bridge once its voltage increases more than by +0.25V. I would like to remind you that this increase leaves the NB voltage at a pretty high level of 1.5V. Take, for example, abit IP35 pro mainboard that is great for CPU overclocking. We only had to increase this voltage setting to 1.47V on abit board to ensure that our Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 would run stably at 475MHz bus frequency.
I don’t know which of the above described reasons the right one is. It could even be not the best mainboard sample that we got. Please get me right: Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 is a very nice board to work with, setting overclocking parameters is easy and convenient. Quiet resetting of the parameters in case of over-overclocking is a minor inconvenience. And the board does overclock CPUs just fine, although not impressively.
No doubt, Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 mainboard is a very attractive solution thanks to numerous advantages and great features we have pointed out in our review. It is not a universal mainboard, but a good solution for a home system. Average overclocking potential makes it not very fit for an overclocking testbed, but I would love to have it in my home PC. Besides, we have pointed out quite a few things that could be improved, so hopefully, this feedback will be taken into consideration.
Despite the seemingly modest accessories bundle, we have nothing to complain about here. The PCB layout and mainboard functionality are practically impeccable. The only thing to work on is the Silent-Pipe chipset cooling system. Most of our suggestions deal with the mainboard BIOS:
Please don’t be discouraged with this pretty long wish list. It is not a list of drawbacks, but our recommendations that hopefully will make great Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 mainboard even better. Unlike other boards we have reviewed that are easier to design from scratch than fix. You can say that we were even a little bit biased towards this board, paying attention to every little thing about it.
If our recommendations are put into life, this excellent mainboard will become practically perfect. And if its overclocking potential improves, then Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 mainboard will turn into a universal solution suitable for both: home use and record-breaking overclocking experiments. We could finally get that ideal mainboard we have been looking for all this time.