PC Perspective - Intel P35 Motherboards

	Intel P35 Motherboards - Asus and Gigabyte
	Author: Ryan Shrout Date: May 21, 2007 Subject: Motherboard Manufacturer: General

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Summary

The following is a summary of the more detailed analysis of the new Intel P35 chipset motherboards. For all the in-depth analysis and testing you'd expect from us, be sure to click this link to get all the details!

Click this link to get the full article

Along with the chipset launch today, which we already covered the technical aspects of in a separate article, we have a handful of motherboards based on the P35 chipset to look at. Both Asus and Gigabyte sent along a pair of motherboards with the new core logic, but interestingly only ONE of the four boards had support for DDR3 on it; the others continued to use DDR2 memory slots.

Here today we'll be taking a QUICK look at all four motherboards layouts, features and BIOS options and summarizing with a quick set of benchmarks. The boards covered in here are the Asus P5K Deluxe, Asus P5K3 Deluxe, Gigabyte P35-DS3R and the Gigabyte P35-DQ6.

Our first Intel P35 chipset motherboard is the Asus P5K Deluxe. I'll let the pictures do the majority of the talking here and chime in on the new or unique features the board offers.

The Asus P5K3 Deluxe model is the higher end of the two motherboards Asus sent us, and as you might guess from the '3' in the name, it supports DDR3 memory.

Gigabyte also sent two motherboards based on the Intel P35 chipset and both of which look to be excellent options though they obviously cater to two different crowds.

Our final motherboard is the Gigabyte P35-DQ6 - an enthusiast option if I've ever seen one.

Since the P35 chipset is really just an incremental upgrade of the existing 975X/P965 chipset family, I left most of our benchmarks out and focused instead on looking at the Gigabyte P35-DS3R DDR2-800 memory performance versus the DDR3-1066 memory performance the Asus P5K3 Deluxe provided.

Conclusions

My initial testing with DDR3 memory technology is promising; unlike the move from DDR1 to DDR2 where performance gains took months to realize, here we are seeing small, model gains at launch. In reality though, the need to move from DDR2 to DDR3 won't really be reached until we hit the 1333 MHz memory speeds and maybe even 1600 MHz. Until then, the added latency of the new technology will probably cause some slowdowns in things like gaming and random-data tasks.

We'll have to wait and see how the prices work out, but since these boards are so new, we won't be seeing retail prices for another week or two. After they are for sale we can take into consideration the pricing on these competing products to make a more well-rounded decision. The new DDR3 memory will certainly add quite a bit to the price and it could end up being VERY hard to find seeing how much trouble we had just getting samples in this late during the launch. But all things being equal, all four of the motherboards I tested today would make an excellent base for a new gaming PC.

If you have any questions or comments on this review of the product itself, join in the discussion at this thread of our forums!

Be sure to use our price checking engine to find the best prices on the Intel P35 motherboards, and anything else you may want to buy!

Next Page - The Intel P35 Chipset