Introduction

Along with the official 'Bearlake' 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.

The Chipset

Uncovering the chipsets from the heatsinks that tower over them we can see the familiar package that Intel's north bridge chips have used for some time. 

The die on the north bridge is 34mm squared and consists of a meager 4.6 million transistors or so.

The south bridge is a bit smaller overall and uses the older BGA packaging in an area of 31mm squared.  It however uses closer to 45 million transistors to power all the storage and extension options.

Again, for more technical details on the features of the P35 chipset, check out my other article published today on that subject.

DDR3 Memory Arrives

As you know by now the Intel P35 chipset has support for BOTH DDR2 and DDR3 memory, but not at the same time.  For our board testing the fine folks at Corsair Memory were able to hook us up with a sample of their XMS3 DDR3-1066 modules.

These beauties are rated at 1066 MHz at timings of 7-7-7-20 and a CAS latency of 7.  While that is higher than we are used to seeing in both DDR2 and especially DDR1, the higher frequencies ought to help alleviate some of the memory latency increase.

Here are two Corsair modules mating up, one a DDR2 stick while the other a DDR3.  You can see that just as with the transition from DDR1 to DDR2, the notches don't match to help prevent the installation of the incorrect memory type into a motherboard.

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.

These are DDR2 memory slots, so don't get the P5K Deluxe expecting to use any fancy new DDR3 sticks. 

The Intel ICH9 completely drops the IDE channel from its feature list and as such the Asus engineers have included a JMicron chip that enables an IDE port as well as the external SATA connections.

Even though the north bridge on the P35 only supports a single x16 PCIe connection, Asus decided to split it up into two x8 PCIe slots in order to support AMD's CrossFire technology on the motherboard.  Other than that, the board offers a well rounded slot configuration with three legacy PCI slots and two x1 PCIe slots. 

The Asus P5K Deluxe uses passive cooling on the chipsets as well as on the MOSFETs surrounding the CPU.

The P5K Deluxe sports only a SINGLE PS2 port, so keep that in mind as you look at the boards.  It also has six USB 2.0 ports, both optical and coaxial digital audio output, dual Gigabit networking connections and 8-channel HD audio from an ADI 1988 chip.  Also note the attachment on the far right that is the integrated Wireless LAN that supports 802.11g/b. 

This shot is actually of parts from the P5K3; the only thing the P5K does NOT come with is the Asus fan for heat pipe spreader fins.

Asus has done a very good job with the P5K Deluxe's BIOS -- most of these screen shots will basically explain themselves so check them out to see all the options the board will provide users.

The FSB frequency tops out at 800 MHz or 3200 MHz quad pumped.

On our board, setting the DRAM frequency to anything in the BIOS always resulted in a DDR2-889 being used according to our CPU-z application.

CPU voltages on this board topped out at 1.7v which seems pretty low for an enthusiast board.

The OC profiles allow you to save your BIOS settings into one of two spots in order to quickly recall them later.

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.

These are the DDR3 memory slots; officially the chipset only supports DDR3-1066 but the board itself advertises DDR3-1333 support though we have yet to see any DDR3-1333 memory hit our test bench.

The majority of the motherboard layouts are the same between the P5K and P5K3.

The P5K3 does have a much more elaborate heat pipe cooling system on it though and should enable some faster overclocking on the chipset and memory speeds.

Again this is the same external configuration that the Asus P5K Deluxe had including six USB 2.0 ports, dual Gigabit Ethernet connections, 8-channel audio and a connection for two eSATA ports.  The wireless connection on the far right comes with an antennae to use and runs both 802.11b and 802.11g.

Here the extras include all the SATA cables you could need, a fan for cooling the heat pipe fins if you use passive cooling on your CPU as well as the antennae for the wireless networking.

As you would expect, the BIOS on the P5K3 Delux is very similar to that of the P5K Deluxe, though this motherboard stretches the overclocking bounds a little bit further.

The BIOS offers DDR3 memory speeds of 800 MHz, 889 MHz and 1066 MHz.

The latencies are going to be higher and in fact our tests were done at 7-7-7-20 with a CAS latency of 7.

I also noted that there were significantly FEWER options for memory tweaks on the P5K3 Deluxe possibly due to the immaturity of the platform.

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.

For some reason, the Gigabyte BIOS still requires you to hit Ctrl-F1 to unlock ALL of the options inside the tweaking menus, but overall did a good job of present options to the power user.

This poorly documented feature attempts to OC your PCIe bus for the graphics card.

The FSB on the Gigabyte P35-DS3R goes up to 700 MHz or 2800 MHz quad pumped.  That should be plenty of head room for overclockers.

The BIOS does have a slightly annoying feature of blinking these red options on an off to indicate that they are high enough to possible damage your hardware.  It made taking screen shots pretty difficult.

The CPU voltages can go up to 2.0v here while the Asus BIOS limited us to 1.7v.

Here are all of the memory timings and settings you can adjust in the BIOS as well.

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

Again the Gigabyte motherboard goes the route of DDR2 memory support rather than DDR3.

Rather than go after the same users with the DQ6 that the cheaper DS3R would attract, the higher-end P35-DQ6 motherboard features the dual x8 PCIe graphics slots for multiple GPUs. 

The same Gigabyte-branded storage chip is being used to provide a couple of SATA channels as well as the IDE channel to the P35-DQ6.

Gigabyte even went as far as to put heatsinks on the BACK of the motherboard -- and heavy ones at that!

Unlike the cheaper Gigabyte model, this one uses a high end heat pipe cooling system for the north and south bridge chips as well as the CPU power MOSFETs. 

The connection diagram is the same though; a single Gigabit Ethernet connection, four USB ports and 8-channel audio.

This close up on the retention clip for the primary GPU slot shows a new and improved design; you can remove it by EITHER pushing on the knob on the back or pulling on the disc from front.

The DQ6 didn't come with much more than the DS3R did though another set of eSATA cables were included.

Again you have to use the Ctrl-F1 trick, but the Gigabyte BIOS is very impressive once you can see all the options it provides.

The same 700 MHz FSB limits are here, if you can even call them limits.

Here is where its interesting -- adding 1.55v to the DDR2 memory bus can really help in overclocking or frying your parts!

The P35-DQ6 takes the CPU voltages up another few steps as well allowing for up to 2.35v going to the CPU.

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. 

Here's the test setup:

Intel P35 Chipset Motherboard Test System Setup
CPU	Intel Core 2 Extreme X6700 - Review
Motherboards	Gigabyte P35-S3R Asus P5K3 Deluxe EVGA nForce 680i Motherboard - Review
Memory	Corsair TWIN2X2048-8500C4 / 4-4-4-14 CAS4 Corsair Twin3X2048-1067C7 / 7-7-7-20 CAS7
Hard Drive	Western Digital Raptor 150 GB - Review
Sound Card	Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Value
Video Card	ATI X1900 XTX
Video Drivers	AMD Catalyst 7.4
Power Supply	Silverstone Zeus 650 watt
DirectX Version	DX10
Operating System	Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit

For my initial testing I ran SiSoft Sandra, PCMark05, USB and SATA performance on HDTach 3.0.1.0 and I threw in some power testing as well to make sure the new chipsets weren't out of line.

While the SiSoft CPU test shows no difference, the DDR3-1006 memory on the Asus P5K3 Deluxe motherboard actually sees a performance gain in the synthetic memory tests from Sandra.  If I recall correctly, that didn't happen with the initial batches of DDR2 motherboards and modules and this bodes well for DDR3 support.

PCMark05 scores saw a very slight increase but in reality the scores are even enough to call the results a tie.

I didn't expect anything less from Intel's chipset department but we had to thrown in some SATA and USB storage testing to make sure those features hadn't lost their touch while gaining on others. 

The new P35 chipset's power consumption is just SLIGHTLY higher than the NVIDIA chipset according to my testing and the DDR3 motherboard actually use MORE power even though the memory itself uses less voltage than DDR2.  Differences in motherboard features and manufacturing are probably to blame there.

Conclusions

My initial testing with DDR3 memory technology is promising; unlike the move from DDR1 to DDR2 where performance gains to 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.

The DDR2-based P35 motherboard options though appeared to be very robust though as well and should you be on the verge of upgrading your system to a Core 2 Duo based configuration, picking the new Intel P35 chipset motherboards with DDR2 support is going to keep you going performance wise and still offer a durable upgrade forecast.  Both the Asus P5K Deluxe and the Gigabyte P35-DQ6 motherboards were impressive, but the robust heat pipes on the Gigabyte motherboard paired with the added overclocking options that it has as well makes it my best choice for the first wave of P35 products. 

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.