Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4

INTRODUCTION

The Intel P35 has been on the market for a few months now.  It is a fantastic chip and has put a huge challenge to the NVIDIA’s 680i chipset, which also offers some great overclocking results and excellent features.  Although, the top of the line Intel’s upcoming X38 (the chipset maybe released by the time you read this review), most users may not wish to spend that insane amount of money on a motherboard while they can get a similar performance at much cheaper price.  That’s why choosing a motherboard based on the P35 or even the NVIDIA 680i chipset would make sense.  Both of the chipsets have been on the market for awhile now and they have matured and run stable with excellent features and performance.  Today, we will take a closer look at the Gigabyte’s GA-P35-DS4 (rev. 1.2) and put it against the EVGA 680i and hopefully we can determine who would be the performance king of the $150~$200 motherboard price segment.

The Gigabyte has been a huge manufacturer of motherboards.  In fact, they have total of 13 motherboards (when I counted) with Intel P35 chipset.  The GA-P35-DS4 is their mainstream segment motherboard that is virtually identical to their top of the line GA-P35-DQ6 but with six phases switching voltage regulator rather than twelve phases found in the DQ6.  The GA-P35-DS4 actually has gone through four revisions, 1.x, 1.0, 1.2, and 2.0.  The difference between the revisions are not being specified at Gigabyte’s website but after carefully examine the specifications, I think the difference among the 1.x revisions are the different heat sink designs; while the 2.0 revision actually has more dramatic design changes.  Gigabyte took out the Serial and Parallel port from the back of the IO ports and replace them with four more USB ports given the motherboard total of eight USB ports (as opposed to the 4 found with the 1.x revisions).  We have received the 1.2 revision board that we will put it through the test.

GIGABYTE: The company

GIGABYTE is known throughout the industry as a leader in mainboard and VGA technology. Pioneering such technologies as the i-Ram and all solid capacitor design of their motherboards, it easy to see why they have grown to be a world class provider of technology to the home user. Here is an excerpt taken from their web site:

GIGABYTE, one of the most well-known IT brands in the industry, started as a motherboard technology research laboratory with the passion of a few young engineers two decades ago. With the vision and insights to the market, GIGABYTE has become one of the world's largest manufacturers. On top of motherboards and graphics accelerators, GIGABYTE has further expanded its product portfolio to include notebook and desktop PC's, digital home entertainment appliances, networking servers, communications, mobile and handheld devices. GIGABYTE has risen from an eight-man office to a world class enterprise in the IT industry.