Bearlake: MSI P35 Platinum, ASUS P5K/P5K3 Deluxe, GIGABYTE P35-DQ6

What does Intel's Bearlake platform offer to take us into the next generation?

Bearlake is here. As the successor to Intel’s wildly popular 965 and 975-series, there’s no doubt these new boards will generate a lot of interest among the enthusiast community. X38 is the name of the mobo that will replace the 975X (adding PCIe 2.0) and will come a little later, while the P35 series boards we’re reviewing here will take over for the P965.

It’s definitely an evolution rather than revolution; the ability to handle 1333MHz FSB processors such as the upcoming 45nm Penryn chips being P35’s most notable feature. The only other major change is the new ICH9 southbridge, which comes with the same capabilities as ICH8, but drops PS/2 and LPT support and allows eSATA ports to act as multipliers so the user can daisy chain a number of drives off the one port.

A new technology called ‘Rapid Recovery’ is also implemented – which for all intents and purposes seems to be a hard drive imaging and incremental update program crossed with RAID 1. It’s capable of scheduled or conditional backups to a selected drive (for example, auto-updating the clone drive whenever a notebook is docked), or like RAID 1 can simply be permanently updated. The clone can then be mounted as a read-only volume to recover files individually or completely replace a failed drive.

Cross what?
The board also supports two PCIe x16 length slots, although like the P965 only one is 16x, with the other at x4. We can hear you all ask now: Does it still run CrossFire? The answer is a little drawn out. By all accounts they should – however the MSI board wouldn’t boot with our X1950XTXs. The ASUS P5K and Gigabyte P35-DQ6 would boot and the CrossFire option appeared, yet when trying to enable the feature it would error out, claiming a 3D application was running, the interconnect cable wasn’t connected or the motherboard had no communication channels between the PCI Express slots. Apparently a driver update from ATI will fix this.

Specifications
MSI: $299
ASUS: $379/$429
GIGABYTE: $355

Supplier: MSI, Asus, Gigabyte

Board	MSI P35 Platinum	ASUS P5K	ASUS P5K3	Gigabyte P35-DQ6
Socket	775	775	775	775
Southbridge	ICH9R	ICH9R	ICH9R	ICH9R
Memory	DDR2	DDR2	DDR3	DDR2
PCIe 16x/8x/4x/1x	1/0/1/2	1/0/1/2	1/0/1/2	1/0/1/3
PCI	2	3	3	2
Internal SATA	4	6	6	8
eSATA	2	2	2	Up to 4 via pass-throughs
PATA/FDD	1/1	1/1	1/1	1/1
Extras	Optical S/PDIF 6-pin FireWire	Optical/Coax S/PDIF; 6pin FireWire; onboard 802.11g	Optical/Coax S/PDIF; 6pin FireWire; onboard 802.11g	Optical/Coax S/PDIF; 6pin FireWire; parallel & serial