Meet Intel P35: Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R Mainboard Review

by Ilya Gavrichenkov , Anna Filatova
05/22/2007 | 06:49 PM

The launch of new processor family based on Core micro-architecture that keeps expanding into different market segments strengthened Intel’s positions even more. This CPU is currently extremely popular, which is not surprising at all as it offers the today’s best combination of consumer features. Trying to secure its leading position and increase the company’s influence in the processor market Intel continues growing the processor family releasing new CPU models aimed at lower as well as upper market segments.

As we have seen, the manufacturer has paid special attention to inexpensive processor models lately. The price of the youngest Core 2 Duo solutions has dropped down to $100 range, and hence pushed away the competitors quite noticeably. However at the same time Intel certainly doesn’t forget about its high-performance solutions either. This summer we should welcome dual-core Core 2 Duo processors and quad-core Core 2 Extreme processors working at higher clock speeds and supporting faster processor bus – 1333MHz Quad Pumped Bus.

Of course, the increase in the bus frequency of Intel’s flagship processors requires Intel to make sure that the proper infrastructure is there. And first of all, it implies the launch of the new core logic sets as the existing LGA775 chipsets, i975X and iP965, officially support only 1067MHz Quad Pumped Bus. No wonder, that the new chipsets from this family start appearing in the market already; Intel P35 and integrated Intel G33 have already been launched.

Another two representatives of this family, top Intel X38 and Intel G35 with faster graphics core are due within the next few summer months, and will most likely hit the streets together with the new CPUs.

P35 is the first one from this “fantastic four” to catch our attention. Firstly, the first mainboards based on it have already emerged in hardware stores. Secondly, our readers are primarily interested in chipsets like that: mainstream solutions without the integrated graphics core. And thirdly, this is the solution that advanced computer users have long been waiting for. Combining relatively low price with the whole lot of new features, it should replace the good iP965 chipset and become a powerful alternative to Nvidia core logic in systems without SLI support.

The first mainboard manufacturer to provide our lab with a sample of their mass solution on Intel P35 chipset was Gigabyte Company. This manufacturer has been paying special attention to RND lately, which paid back well: Gigabyte has been ahead of many of their competitors with the announcements and launches of principally new mainboards. So, this gives us a great opportunity to meet the new Intel core logic for the first time with the help of the new Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R mainboard, which will be the main hero of our today’s article. However before we start discussing the peculiarities of the new Gigabyte board, let’s dwell on the innovative features of the new Intel P35 core logic set first.

Intel P35: Closer Look

New discrete mainstream chipset, Intel P35, doesn’t differ too greatly from the predecessor, iP965, when it comes to features. The major innovations deal with support of faster processor bus and memory controller that can now work not only with DDR2 SDRAM, but also with DDR3 SDRAM. However, DDR3 SDRAM memory modules are not available in the market yet, so the first Intel P35 based mainboards will come equipped with memory DIMM slots for more common DDR2 SDRAM modules. As for the support of different interfaces, the new chipset didn’t undergo any major changes. Most users were quite satisfied with the features offered by iP965 solution, so Intel engineers didn’t invest a lot of time and effort into South Bridge modifications.

However, you shouldn’t think that P35 is very similar to iP965. You can see the differences on the chipsets scheme already:

The new chipset traditionally consists of two micro-chips: P35 GMCH North Bridge and ICH9 South Bridge connected with one another via the DMI bus with 2GB/s bandwidth. The North Bridge supports LGA775 processors working with 800, 1067 or 1333MHz bus; one PCI Express x16 bus for the graphics controller; dual-channel DDR2 or DDR3 SDRAM. Note that you cannot use both memory types on Intel P35 based mainboards at the same time and there can only be four DIMM slots onboard, not more. As for the memory frequencies, the chipset spec claims that P35 supports either DDR2-667/800 SDRAM or faster DDR3-800/1067 SDRAM. You determine the memory frequency by setting the appropriate dividers relative to FSB frequency that can be selected from Intel’s traditionally not very long list.

It is important that the future processors support Intel talks about implies not only the support of upcoming CPUs with 1333MHz bus. Besides that, they also claim that P35 based mainboards will be compatible with the promising Penryn processors that are scheduled to arrive in early 2008. So, they promise that Intel P35 will remain acute for quite some time, which makes this solution even more attractive.

ICH9 South Bridge also pleases us with a few nice improvements. The most essential one is the increased number of supported USB 2.0 ports that now equals 12, and the introduction of a built-in Gigabit network MAC-controller. The integrated Serial ATA controller has also been enhanced. Now you can connect several devices to the eSATA ports implemented through this controller. Moreover, it also supports Intel Rapid Recovery Technology that allows you to create reserve copies and restore the HDD contents very quickly and easily.

ICH9 also supports six additional PCI Express lines. By combining these lines accordingly, the manufacturers can provide Intel P35 based mainboards with PCI Express x1, x2 and x4 slots. By the way, Intel P35 based mainboards may also support ATI Crossfire technology as PCI Express x16 + PCI Express x4 if the board features appropriate slots.

To compare the features of the new Intel core logic set with the LGA775 solutions already available in the market, we put together a table featuring not only the newcomer, Intel P35, but also its predecessor – iP965, and Nvidia nForce 650i SLI chipset that can offer competitive pricing and features.

As you can see, Intel P35 can currently be called the most advanced chipset for LGA775 processors. Intel P965 yields to the newcomer in specifications, while Nvidia solution can only compete with it thanks to SLI support.

By the way, Intel P35 boasts a few other significant strengths that may not be seen in the table. In particular, it is cheaper than iP965 and nForce 650i SLI and at the same time much more economical from the power consumption standpoint.

However, despite the seeming superiority of Intel P35 over the alternative solutions, the last word will have to be said by the mainboard guys. Therefore, it is high time we moved on to our detailed discussion of the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R that we managed to get our hands on.

Specification, Package and Accessories

Gigabyte is one of those mainboard manufacturers who offer a wide range of similar products targeted for different market segments. For example, this time they prepared the entire line-up of solutions based on Intel P35 that differ by their features, accessories bundle and company’s brand name technologies. Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R mainboard is the youngest solution in this family. However, it doesn’t mean that this board would be of less interest for advanced users. On the contrary, it boasts some indisputable advantages. For example, this mainboard doesn’t have all those doubtful technologies that increase the product cost and at the same time have no significant effect on the consumer qualities of the product (we have discussed these features in our previous review called Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 (rev.2.0) Mainboard Review). In other words, although Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R can be considered a low-end/mainstream solution on Intel P35, it has no negative connotation to it whatsoever.

It boasts all the essential features required by computer enthusiasts, which you can actually see from the specification:

The accessories bundle corresponds well to the specification of the product. However, the box contains more than just the necessities: the mainboard itself, user’s manual, CD disk with software and drivers, I/O Shield for the rear panel, FDD and Parallel ATA cables and four Serial ATA cables.

Besides that, Gigabyte also included into the bundle a pretty unique bracket with two eSATA connectors and external hard drive power supply connector as well as a corresponding connector cable and power cable.

The size of the mainboard package is pretty traditional for inexpensive solutions. It has no transparent windows or carry handle. However, its front and back covers carry colorful illustrations telling the potential user about the advantageous features of the product inside.

Functionality

Now let’s discuss the features of the new Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R. We would first of all like to point out that it should be considered one of the most promising solutions of all available in the market. The thing is that new Intel P35 chipset ensures that this mainboard will work fine with LGA775 processors supporting 1333MHz system bus as well as with the upcoming 45nm processors. When it comes to mainboards based on chipsets other than Intel P35, the compatibility with upcoming processors is still questionable.

As for the supported memory types, Gigabyte engineers decided not to introduce the innovative DDR3 interface in their GA-P35-DS3R mainboard. At this time, this is a totally justified solution, because this memory is not available in retail yet. Even when it starts selling its price will evidently be higher than that of DDR2 SDRAM, even though there will be no evident performance advantages at the time and the only factor affecting the price will be the fact that it is a new product.

As a result, Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R features four traditional DDR2 SDRAM slots, like many other mainboards on older iP965 and i975X chipsets. Like many other mainboards, our hero can perform at its best with dual-channel DDR2 SDRAM. Therefore, DIMM slots on the mainboard PCB are color-coded, indicating how the module pairs should be installed for maximum performance.

Since Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R is an inexpensive solution, most mainboard features are implemented through the chipset. You can see it clearly from the mainboard block diagram:

As for additional controllers, the mainboard has a network chip and a chip ensuring Parallel ATA channel and two additional Serial ATA channels implementation. Gigabyte engineers chose PCI Express x1 Gigabit LAN controller from Realtek – RTL 8111B. The addiotnal ATA controller is a PCI Express x1 Gigabyte SATA2 chip. It provides the board with a Parallel ATA-133 channel, because the chipset doesn’t support Parallel ATA interface. However, besides PATA, this chip also supports two Serial ATA-300 channels that can also be utilized for the best.

So, the board ends up having 8 Serial ATA channels (with NCQ support and 3Gbit/s data transfer rate): 6 of these ports are connected to ICH9R and the remaining 2 – to the external controller chip. Both, the integrated ICH9R ATA controller as well as Gigabyte SATA2 chip, allow creating RAID 0 and 1 arrays. ICH9R also supports RAID 0+1 and 5 arrays and Matrix Storage Technology.

I would like to give Gigabyte engineers kudos for eSATA interface implementation. Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R doesn’t have the corresponding ports on the rear panel, as we would see in most cases, but it features two ports laid out on a separate bracket included with the board.

The advantage of this solution is that the same bracket also carries a MOLEX power connector. This connector and the cables included with the board give you the opportunity to connect not only special external HDD chassis to these eSATA ports, but also regular SATA hard disk drives.

Since we haven’t yet had a chance to play with any of the Intel P35 based mainboards, we got pretty excited about 12 (!) USB 2.0 ports. Four of them are traditionally laid out on the mainboard rear panel, while another eight are present in the form of pin-connectors. Note that the board has no IEEE1394 ports at all, Gigabyte engineers obviously decided to save on the corresponding controller.

Integrated HD sound is implemented via the new eight-channel Realtek ALC889A codec. The distinguishing feature of this solution is not just the pretty high sound quality (106dBA SNR), but also Blue-Ray and HD DVD formats support. Moreover, this codec boasts two additional independent output channels (for the front panel) that can be used for the headset, for instance.

As for the expansion slots, Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R offers a pretty god list of them. besides the PCI Express x16 graphics card slot, the mainboard also carries three PCI Express x1 slots (one of them may be blocked by the graphics card cooling system), and three PCI slots. Unfortunately, Gigabyte engineers decided not to equip their mainboard with a second PCI Express x16 slot physically connected to the PCI x4 bus. It means that this mainboard is not compatible with ATI Crossfire technology.

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.

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.

Overclocking

As you know from our previous reviews, iP965 based mainboards have proudly held the title of the best platform for Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme overclocking. They guaranteed the best overclocking results, without any sophisticated manipulations. Therefore, we would expect Intel P35 based solutions to prove pretty overclocking-friendly also, especially since they officially support 1333MHz bus. Therefore, we decided to pay special attention to overclocking experiments on Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R.

For our tests we assembled a system on our mainboard with Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor. Besides we also used 2GB of Corsair Dominator TWIN2X2048-10000C5D DDR2 SDRAM, PowerColor X1900 XTX 512MB graphics card, Western Digital Raptor WD1500AHFD HDD and SilverStone SST-ST85ZF PSU. Thanks to the memory that can run at up to 1250MHz frequency, we didn’t have to worry about its overclocking potential when clocking it synchronously with the FSB bus and setting the timings to 5-5-5-15. Processor was cooled with Zalman CNPS-9700LED cooler. We didn’t install any additional fans on top of the North Bridge heatsink, because it didn’t warm up too much, even during overclocking. The system stability during overclocking was checked with the well-known ORTHOS utility based on Prime95 code.

We managed to find rather quickly the maximum bus frequency that didn’t cause any mainboard stability issues. Mostly, because Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R is very simple to handle during overclocking. To achieve the maximum result we didn’t even have to touch the chipset voltage.

In other words, you can hit pretty good overclocking results on Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R by simply changing the bus frequency and raising the Vcore and Vmem. This way we managed to reach 505MHz bus frequency.

And this is what the BIOS Setup settings looked like to ensure that the mainboard would run stably at this speed:

Unfortunately, we couldn’t check the system performance at higher frequencies, because our CPU couldn’t get beyond 505MHz FSB – it is its FSB Wall. That is why we assume that Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R can do even better than that with different processor samples. Especially, since some users report successful overclocking attempts hitting much higher frequencies.

However, we have also revealed some issues during our experiments. It turned out that Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R mainboard that offers excellent CPU overclocking can’t boast the same success when it comes to memory overclocking. We discovered this when trying to set memory frequency at 1250MHz, which is the nominal speed for Corsair Dominator TWIN2X2048-10000C5D. None of the dividers from the mainboard’s supported list could ensure stable memory performance at this speed. The maximum memory bus frequency when our system retained stability was only 1150MHz.

To be fair, I have to say that DDR2 SDRAM working at such high speeds is very rarely used even in overclocker systems. Therefore, this issue is not a big one. All in all, Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R proved very well suited for successful overclocking.

Testbed and Methods

It is extremely interesting to check out the performance of Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R mainboard, because it is the first mainboard on Intel P35 chipset in our lab. We decided to compare it against a few mainboards from the same price range based on competing chipset solutions. So, the today’s rivals will be ASUS P5B Premium on Intel P965 chipset and ASUS P5N-E SLI on Nvidia nForce 650i SLI.

We will look at the mainboards’ performance in two work modes: when the CPU is working at the default front side bus frequency of 266MHz and when the FSB is overclocked to 400MHz. Therefore we used a Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor overclocked to 3.2GHz that was configured either as 12 x 266MHz or 8 x 400MHz. The memory in both cases was working at 800MHz with 4-4-4-12 timings (for nForce 650i SLI the Command Rate parameter was set to 1T).

We will use the following hardware for the test session:

• Processor: Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 at 3.2GHz (12 x 266MHz or 8 x 400MHz);
• Mainboards:
• Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R (LGA775, Intel P35);
• ASUS P5B Premium (LGA775, Intel P965);
• ASUS P5N-E SLI (Nvidia nForce 650i SLI);
• Memory: 2x1GB DDR2-800 SDRAM (4-4-4-12, Corsair Dominator TWIN2X2048-10000C5D);
• Graphics card: PowerColor X1900 XTX 512MB (PCI Express x16);
• Disk subsystem: Western Digital WD1500AHFD (Serial ATA-150);
• Operating system: Microsoft Windows Vista x86.

Performance

Synthetic Benchmarks and Memory Subsystem Benchmarks

First of all let’s take a look at the results of synthetic benchmarks measuring the memory subsystem performance.

According to the Everest test utility, the memory subsystem of Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R mainboard on Intel P35 chipset doesn’t boast any significant advantages. It is slightly faster than Intel P965 based mainboard in nominal mode, but loses to nForce 650i SLI based one. During overclocking the situation is worse: Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R falls noticeably behind the competitors.

Of course, we should blame the Intel P35 chipset for the failure the memory subsystem of Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R suffered during overclocking. The reasons lie with insufficient BIOS optimization. This is a classical issue of Gigabyte mainboards that are often falling behind their competitors during overclocking. In particular, the entire Gigabyte Intel P965 based line-up experiences the same problems.

Now let’s check out the performance in general benchmarks and real applications.

SuperPi, PCMark05, 3DMark06

3D Games

Sound and Video Encoding

Other Applications

Summing up all the obtained results we can say that Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R demonstrates very good performance at nominal FSB speed. It runs as fast as the competitors and sometimes even outpaces them. It is clear indication that the performance of the new Intel P35 chipset is at least as good as that of the competing solutions.

However, the impression gets spoilt when we move on to the results obtained with overclocked front side bus. Here Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R loses to the ASUS boards on iP965 and nForce 650i SLI. The reason has already been mentioned above: the BIOS of the newcomer needs to be better optimized.

Conclusion

It is pretty hard to make any conclusions about the performance of the new Intel P35 chipset basing on the results of one single mainboard. At this time we will not draw any final verdicts just yet. We would only like to say that according to the first look at this solution, it is at least as efficient as Intel P965 in performance as well as overclocking. However, from the functionality and specifications standpoint the new P35 is undoubtedly more attractive than its mainstream competitors. It officially supports 1333MHz system bus and will be compatible with the upcoming 45nm Penryn processors. Moreover, the chipset acquired the whole list of new features that the predecessor was obviously missing. Namely, the new ICH9R South Bridge now has a Gigabit network MAC-controller and 12 USB 2.0 ports support, while the new North Bridge supports promising DDR3 SDRAM that will conquer frequencies unattainable for DDR2 SDRAM.

As for the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R mainboard that we have reviewed today, it is one of the first solutions on the new Intel P35 chipset to appear in the market and certainly deserves your attention. It is a good alternative to iP965 based mainboards. It supports widespread DDR2 SDRAM, but at the same time offers better consumer features and specifications. Moreover, Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R did very well in our CPU overclocking tests and performed at a very high level in nominal work mode.

However, as we have already mentioned this mainboard still has some frustrating drawbacks, such as limited memory overclocking and not the ultimate performance level with FSB set above the nominal. Hopefully Gigabyte engineers will take our comments into account when working on new mainboard revisions and modifications.

Summing up let me once again list all the cons and pros of the new Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R mainboard.

Highs:

• Guaranteed support of future processors;
• High performance in nominal mode;
• Six-phase processor voltage regulator using very high-quality components;
• Easy and efficient CPU overclocking;
• Smart implementation of eSATA interface support;
• Attractive price.

Lows:

• No second PCI Express x16 graphics slot;
• Relatively low performance with overclocked FSB;
• Unstable operation with DDR2 SDRAM frequency exceeding 1150MHz;
• No voltage monitoring in the system.