Product Listing

Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R (Intel P35)

By Zachary Chan - 13 Jul 2007

Overclocking and Test Setup

Overclocking

  • FSB Settings: 100MHz to 700MHz
  • DDR2 Settings: Auto, 2.0, 2.5, 3.0, 2.66, 3.33, 4.0+
  • PCIe Settings: 90MHz to 150MHz
  • CPU Voltage Settings: 0.51250V to 1.60000V (in 0.00625V steps), 1.6V to 2.0 (in 0.1V steps)
  • Memory Voltage Settings: +0.1V to +0.7V (in 0.1V steps)
  • PCIe Voltage Settings: +0.1V to +0.3V (in 0.1V steps)
  • MCH Voltage Settings: +0.1V to +0.3V (in 0.1V steps)
  • FSB Voltage Settings: +0.1V to +0.3V (in 0.1V steps)
  • Multiplier Selection: Yes (unlocked CPUs only)

 

Ever since the launch of their P965 series of motherboards, especially the now infamous GA-965P-DS3, Gigabyte has suddenly turned into one of the top brands to go for in terms of enthusiast tweaking and platform stability. Gigabyte was first to hype a full 100% solid capacitor design, which they dubbed as their Ultra Durable series of motherboards and you can tell that they're trying to capture the same market with the latest Ultra Durable 2 quipped GA-P35-DS3R. So how well does it actually perform? Up till now, the Intel P35 chipset remains on similar grounds with the P965 in terms of overclocking. We've managed to achieve an average FSB overclock around the 470MHz range for most of the boards we've tested, but there has been no indication that the P35 is more overclockable than the P965. A lot cooler certainly, but not more overclockable.

When we put the GA-P35-DS3R to the test, we didn't expect any different, but Gigabyte clearly has other plans for the board. BIOS-wise, the options and stepping on the GA-P35-DS3R are almost identical to the original GA-965P-DS3, which we'd consider as sufficient, but may not be the most tweakable settings. Nevertheless, the GA-P35-DS3R is an incredible overclocker. This is the very first board we've come across to match the ASUS Commando in overclocking. The maximum stable FSB achieved by the GA-P35-DS3R is a solid 516MHz on stock cooling and a +0.2V tweak to the MCH and FSB, amounting to a quad pumped 2064MHz processor side bus. The board would actually boot up to 525MHz, but was not stable under Windows. The only issue was that the MCH chip ran much hotter than all the previous P35 boards we've tested thus far while overclocking. Not to the extent of the P965's, but definitely much warmer.

CPU-Z overclocking screenshot. Click for full size image.

Another thing we noticed about the GA-P35-DS3R during overclocking was how matured Gigabyte's BIOS recovery has become. The board managed to recover on its own from every single overclocking failure without needing manual CMOS clearing. With its ease of use and intuitiveness, the trial and error of overclocking became so much less of a chore, which says a lot about the board.


Test Setup

The Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R is one of the DDR2 only Intel P35 motherboards in the market, so our benchmarking section will only include DDR2 samples. As a mainstream motherboard, the GA-P35-DS3R will be compared against the Foxconn P35A and the recently reviewed MSI P35 Neo Combo. We will also include results from the ASUS P5K Deluxe and MSI P35 Platinum to see where the board stands in terms of performance against the high-end market. As usual, we employ our standard test setup listed below for all the motherboards used in this review:-

  • Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor (2.93GHz)
  • 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR2-800 @ 4-4-12 CAS 4.0
  • Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 200GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
  • MSI GeForce 8600 GTS 256MB - with ForceWare 158.22 drivers
  • Intel INF 8.3.1.1013 and AHCI 7.5.0.1017 driver set
  • Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 (and DirectX 9.0c)


Benchmarks

The following benchmarks will be run to determine the performance of the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R:-

  • BAPco SYSmark 2004
  • Futuremark PCMark05
  • SPECviewperf 9.0
  • Futuremark 3DMark06
  • AquaMark3
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