Bearlake Launch & Gigabyte P35-DS3R Review - PAGE 18
William Henning - Monday, May 21st, 2007
Overclocking
Since you already saw the numbers all over the charts, there is no use being coy - I managed to reach a quite satisfying 3.5GHz on the Gigabyte P35-DS3R, air cooled!
Its probable that I could have reached a faster processor overclock - after all, I know that the E6400 I've used has reached 3.64GHz before - however I was interested in maximizing the FSB performance. As you may have read in my previous reviews, the Intel platform is limited by the ammount of information that can be pumped through the aging FSB design.
Intel is well aware of this, that is why the P35 officially supports a 1333MHz FSB - and intel will shortly be releasing 6000 series Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad processors that will be "designed for" a 1333MHz FSB - in reality, all this means is that they will have a lower maximum multiplier, and they will be guaranteed to work with a 1333MHz FSB.
How did we reach 3.5GHz?
- we set the FSB to 500MHz
- we set the processor multiplier to 7
- memory timing was set to 1000-4-4-4-12
- Vcore was set at 1.50V for stability
- PCIe frequency was fixed at 100MHz
- memory voltage was set at 2.30V
- PCIe Overvoltage, FSB Overvoltage, MCH Overvoltage were all set at +0.20V
- We used an excellent Noctua 12 heatsink with two 12cm fans
- We tested with high end Corsair PC2-8888 4-4-4-12 memory
What's Next?
The P35 is clearly the follow on design to the 965P - and Intel will be bringing us the replacement for the 975X - the X38 - in the third quarter.
The X38 will be more performance oriented:
- PCIe 2.0
- Dual PCIe 16x support
- DDR3 support
- Quad Core 1333FSB support
- "Overspeed protection remove"
You know, Intel making such a big deal out of "Overspeed protection removed" makes me hope that they will unlock the multipliers on their processors not only downward, but upwards as well... that would indeed be sweet for enthusiasts!
If past experiences bear out, the X38 should perform slightly better than the P35, and if Intel and NVIDIA get their cross-licensing deals figured out, perhaps it will have SLI support. Since AMD purchased SLI it is unlikely that Crossfire will be supported on the X38 by Intel, and Intel's discrete GPU solutions are still quite some time in the future... so only time will tell which dual graphics solution will occupy those two PCIe 2.0 16x slots.
Conclusion
The Gigabyte P35-DS3R appears to be an excellent implementation of the P35 chipset; and while its performance did not exceed the excellent figures set in the past by the 965P chipset, it did not perform at a lower lever either. Gamers will be pleased at how well it performed in our testing, and business users will also like the Winstone results. Media professionals will especially like the encoding performance.
As you could tell from our testing, including the numbers we presented for the other motherboards, we've had no difficulty whatsoever far exceeding the previous "official" 1066MHz FSB - frankly it has been quite some time since we've run into a high end board that would not run at least at 1600MHz FSB. Given how well the 965P and 975X chipsets performed in the past, I strongly suspect that they were originally designed for 1333MHz operation, but were labelled at 1066MHz for marketing reasons.
(The graphics core in the G33 was also tweaked for improved performance, and increased DX10 support - however this was something we have yet to test, as we don't have any G33 based boards to test at this time)
For all intents and purposes, I'd say that the P35 chipset is merely an update of the 965P design adding support for using DDR3 memory, and officially being qualified for 1333MHz operation - which means that the Dell's, Gateway's etc. of the world will now start shipping boxes with 1333MHz FSB, which as you could see from the charts will lead to a healthy boost in performance.
For an even greater "stock" boost, we will have to wait for 1600MHz FSB's to become mainstream - something that I suspect will arrive in conjunction with the future release of Penryn 45nm processors.
We also have two Asus P35 based boards in the lab, the P5K3 Deluxe WiFi and the P5K3R Deluxe WiFi - and we will shortly be publishing a review on them, including a thorough performance comparison between them highlighting the difference between DDR2 and DDR3. Unfortunately we did not receive DDR3 memory before this article went to press, and we are also waiting for a new BIOS - so you will have to wait for our findings about those boards - I can tell you that they also look like nice boards and you should see their featureset and pictures in the preview I linked above if you haven't done so already.
In the sum of all things, the Gigabyte P35-DS3R is an excellent board, and if you are building a new system, you should seriously consider it - however if you already have a good system based on the superb P965, 975X, or one of NVIDIA's 650/680 and 5 series chipsets, there is no compelling reason for you to switch motherboards.
Recommended.
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