Gigabyte P35-DS3R
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.
The P35-DS3R only supports DDR2 memory, though based on the cost and availability of DDR3 this isn’t a bad thing in most regards.
Gigabyte also decided to use an external logic chip to get the IDE port that most users will still require onto the motherboard.
The P35-DS3R only supports a single x16 PCIe graphics card so don’t expect to run any kind of multi-GPU configuration on this board.
Gigabyte also chose passive cooling for this motherboard though the heatsinks do not use heat pipes like the Asus models we saw. The north bridge heatsink did get very hot during testing.
The external connections on this board include four USB 2.0 ports, a single Gigabit Ethernet port and 8-channel audio support.
Gigabyte didn’t include a whole bunch with this board but did get enough to allow for a single external SATA connection and internal SATA and IDE cables.
