Gigabyte GA-P31-DS3L

INTRODUCTION

Just in time for the winter season Intel adopted an alphabet soup strategy with their current chipsets.  While it won’t help ward off cold feet from the dizzying array of alternatives currently on the market, it will address one key area where current model Intel chipsets have been shy to enter, the budget market.  For this review we are going to take a look at the relatively unknown P31 chipset.

For the mainstream market there is P35, X38, soon to be P45 and X48 respectively.  That doesn’t sound bad, unless looking for an Intel chipset with integrated graphics onboard in which case you get to decide between G31, G33, G35, and later G45 which will be a significant upgrade from previous Gxx chipsets.  While plenty of choices are a good thing confusing the consumer is usually not.  Not to mention not even the unreleased P45, G45, and X48 chipsets will be compatible with future Nehalem processors, but we digress.

To shed some light on a confusing situation Gigabyte has sent us one of their P31 motherboards for review.  P31 hardware is targeted directly for the budget consumer and accordingly can be found for just under $80 in several flavors from various motherboard makers.  Intel is not known for cheaply pricing their venerable chipsets, so P31 is unique in that it is a hybrid of the much acclaimed P35 and old stalwart 975X chipsets.  For the technically inclined the P31 chipset is composed of the P35 northbridge MCH chip with the 975X’s ICH7 southbridge chip for an interesting combination of old and new.  For reference 965 chipsets used ICH8 and P35 uses the ICH9 series of southbridge chips.

P35 has been a popular, if usually pricey choice until late as it has offered tangible performance benefits over the older 975X and 965P chipsets it has replaced, and today we shall discover if P31 can offer the same performance or even a possible performance improvement at a lower price!  While there are more than a few motherboard manufacturers with P31 based offerings, these boards are not very common and more importantly all P31 boards do feature some strings attached which we will cover in detail later in the article.

ABOUT GIGABYTE

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.