Big G delivers one of the year's great motherboards.
Based on the recent P35 Bearlake chipset, the DS3R offers entry-level performance for those after the pure essentials, with a few frills here and there.Sporting the ICH9R southbridge, the P35-DS3R supplies RAID functionality, whereas its ICH9-based P35-DS3P series brother does not. Further setting it apart from the otherwise very similar P35-DS3P, is a single PCIe x16 slot. The P35-DS3R has a very clear and functional design. The PCIe x16 slot, when supporting a monstrous graphics card such as the 8800 GTX/Ultra, does not block any of the six available SATA II ports. A GPU with a dual-slot cooler will, on the other hand, block the CMOS clear jumper.This brings us to an area of frustration. This bad placement is prevalent across GIGABYTE’s whole P35-based range, from the P35-DQ6 to the P35-DS3P, down to the P35-DS3L, and over to the P35C-DS3R DDR2/DDR3 combination motherboard. Let’s cross our fingers and hope that the next revision has the jumper in a better location such as the edge of the motherboard PCB. Of course, a built-in switch would be nice, but one step at a time.The DIMM slots are well-positioned. This allows for adding or removing memory modules without the need to remove the graphics card – vital if you happen to be using a long-reaching card such as the NVIDIA 8800 series and AMD HD2900XT. GIGABYTE maintains the use of solid-state capacitors across its P35 series with the GA-P35-DS3R sporting a full complement.We find the heatpipe jungles and soaring finned towers that have become the norm for motherboard cooling to be a nuisance, so we were pleasantly surprised to find the DSR3 free of such devices. The lofty heatpipe-threaded and multi-finned heatsink towers often interfere with the use of quality, third-party CPU and chipset coolers, so to finally have a motherboard that offers a simplistic, and not to mention effective, fanless chipset heatsink is a godsend.The board features support for single-core, dual-core and quad-core processors – from 800MHz quad-pumped FSB chips such as the dual-core Pentium E2140, all the way through to the recently released QX6850. To test this, we placed an assortment of processors, including the QX6850, in the motherboard and found them to all perform as expected.Using our X6800 set to the stock FSB of 266MHz and a multiplier of nine, we gathered the essential benchmark scores.The P35-DS3R scored 11167 in 3DMark06, 1min 38.328s in Super Pi 4M, and 30.187s in wPrime 32M. The suite was rounded out by Everest memory read, write and latency tests, where the system scored 7459MB/s, 4863MB/s and 68.7ns respectively.Our next step was to overclock the motherboard. We managed a stable 500MHz FSB. Conveniently, with the processor multiplier set to six, this resulted in a 3GHz CPU frequency.At the overclocked settings, the system scored 11,265 in 3DMark06, 1min 33.546s in Super Pi 4M and 29.500s for wPrime 32M. The difference between the Super Pi and wPrime results shows the gain from the increased bandwidth from the 234MHz increase over the stock 266MHz FSB.Everest’s memory read, write and latency tests returned 8724MB/s, 7952MB/s and 58.7ns respectively.The GA-P35-DS3R is a pleasant motherboard to work with. Providing simplistic and effective overclocking and excellent layout and design, it’s an affordable quality motherboard that would be at home in a basic gaming machine or sitting on an overclocker’s test bench.
Issue: 107 | December, 2009