Looking at the motherboard, you can't help but notice the HUGE heatsink on the P35. Either the chipset generates a lot of heat, or Gigabyte deliberately went overboard in order to give us a lot of elbow room for overclocking.
All those nice solid state capacitors also seem to hint towards a deliberate performance oriented design. The encased ferrite cores also serve to suggest that this is an extreme performance board.
I also liked the eight SATA2 ports, and the plentiful supply of expansion slots - with a PCIe 16x slot for a GPU, three PCIe 1x slots, and three PCI slots, there is plenty of room for add-on cards. I was also happy to see the legacy serial and parallel ports; and these days, the single IDE channel really is sufficient. The floppy disk connector is almost a waste of space given modern BIOSes capability to be flashed from a USB drive.
To recap, the P35-DS3R has the following features:
- 800/1066/1333MHz FSB
- dual channel DDR2 support
- Realtek ALC889A codec with High Definition Audio, 7.1 channel and S/PDIF In/Out
- 1 PCIe 16x slot
- 3 PCIe 1x slots
- 3 PCI 32 bit slots
- 8 SATA2 channels (six on the southbridge with RAID5 support, two on additional SATA/IDE controller)
- 1 IDE channel
- 1 floppy connector
- 12 USB ports (4 on back panel, 8 on headers)
- PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors
- 1 parallel port
- 1 serial port
- 1 Coax S/PDIF out connector
- 1 Optical S/PDIF out connector
- 4 USB 2.0 ports
- 1 RJ45 ethernel port
- 6 audio out jacks
- Award BIOS
Quite a good feature mix, however it would have been nice if a Firewire (IEEE 1394) port had been provided. It's safe to say that Firewire support will probablly come in the form of a D-bracket and motherboard pinheader for future board revisions/models.
The P35-DS3R may not look as fancy as some heat pipe designs, but it is obvious that a lot of thought has been put into the design and engineering; it fairly screams "I AM AN ENTHUSIAST BOARD".
I am really very anxious to find out how well the P35-DS3R performs in comparison to the excellent P965 chipset - and some other Core 2 compatible chipsets we've tested in the past. As you might know, the P965 is actually one of the performance and overclocking kings on the market, so the P35 has a lot to live up to.
Above, we can also see the small four pin auxiliary power connector - apparently Gigabyte did not feel the P35-DS3R needed the beefier eight pin connector.
Below we can see the four DIMM sockets for DDR2 modules, the legacy floppy connector, and the ATX power connector. I think Gigabyte made a wise choice in supporting DDR2 instead of DDR3 in this board, as DDR3 modules are still scarce, carry a price premium, and require rather large latencies - however, let it be known that many manufacturers, Gigabyte and Asus included, will have DDR3 capable versions of the P35 board. In fact, we have an Asus board with just that support which we will publish about very shortly.
Just look at that nice cluster of SATA2 connectors - and the familiar IDE connector jumps out at us with its vivid green color. Again, note all of the plentiful solid state capacitors.
You have to love all these slots. If the board turns out to be a good performer, I can see MythTV and MediaCenter users flocking to it - just look at all those opportunities to plug in HDTV and SDTV tuners!
And last but not least we come to the I/O panel. PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports, a parallel port, a serial port, S/PDIF coax and optical ports, four USB2.0 ports, a gigabit Ethernet port, and six audio connectors... plenty of connectivity. However, that previously mentioned absence of a FireWire port and a second Ethernet port still hurts. Would have been a very welcome addition.
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