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With the Intel P35 chipset, we are presented with a number of new features. The most notable of those of course would be the inclusion of DDR3 memory support. The enhanced bus speeds also sweeten the deal, but for simplicities sake, I will simply reference readers to our recent Intel P35 "Bearlake" launch article. That review is quite comprehensive and does provide a complete details of what to expect from the P35.

There are certainly a number of manufacturers that have begun producing P35 based motherboards for the market, and Gigabyte has been one of the first to launch. A simple overview of the Gigabyte 6-QUAD GA-P35T-DQ6 motherboard and all of its features follows.There are quite the number of standard features for the GA-P35DQ6 motherboard, such as the 8 channel audio, the 8 SATA ports, extensive USB2.0 connectivity and so forth, as well as a a few extra features unique to this particular board.

The Intel P35 Express Northbridge chipset to the left, and the Intel ICH9R Southbridge chip to the right. 

The features do make for a decent motherboard, though a secondary LAN port would have been much appreciated. Of course, the division of the 22 PCI-e lanes can't begin to compare with the NVIDIA 680i chipset for sheer graphical throughput. Unfortunately, Intel has yet to release any hint of a P35 chipset that will deliver 16x by 16x PCI-e performance. One could speculate however that they may be saving some steam for future iterations of the P35 chipset. An Intel P35 Extreme chipset would be nice.

The preceeding flowchart also helps to illustrate how Intel implemented the bandwidth allocation for the P35 Express chipset.

For the most part, this board is pretty much the standard for high-end enthusiast level hardware. There were a few notables however that did catch my eye and that should be explored further.