Gigabyte, like others, released a slew of motherboards utilizing Intel's P35 chipset when it was first announced. The P35C-DS3R is unique to their line-up though, since it will accept both DDR2 and DDR3 memory. We pit the boards performance using both types of memory against our recently reviewed ASUS P5K and P5K3.

Introduction

By now, Intel's P35 chipset needs no introduction. It has boosted performance over P965 and brings a few new things to the table, my favorite being the S-ATA disable. In our reviews of ASUS' own P5K and P5K3, we were left impressed to say the least. Compared to our boards that utilize NVIDIA's 680i and Intel's 975x, the P35 cleaned house in near every test.

If you are in the market to build a new PC and don't care for SLI support, then P35 boards are a good bet, unless you want to wait until X38 is launched later this year, which is supposed to be vastly superior to P35. Time will tell if that's actually going to be the case or not, but so far it's looking hopeful.

As mentioned in our intro, once P35's NDA was lifted, motherboard manufacturers all over announced their new line-ups. ASUS themselves released a staggering seven P35-based boards and Gigabyte released five. MSI and abit also have great looking boards as well, a few of which we will be taking a look at in the weeks to come.

Full Article: http://techgage.com/article/gigabyte_ga-p35c-ds3r/