I wish this review was prior to the P35 chipset release, there's some pretty similar P35 gigabyte boards that would probably be a better option for a new system. However this is a good overview of a board that is comparable to the P35 versions.

Nice review!

Possible typo on the last page (or maybe not, I'm not a native English speaker...)
"making this a formidal gaming setup"
This sounds like "formidable" ?

And, " six mounting holes "?, it looks like it has 3 in the middle, 2 at the bottom, and (can't see in the picture but I'm guessing) 2 at the top? That would make 7 no?

too bad this mobo doesn't include a bracket

Cansan --

Thanks for the typo report.... and you're right that it has more than 6 mounting holes. It has 7: 3 across the middle, and two on the sides. This has been clarified to read.... "Due to its small size, the board has only seven mounting holes instead of the usual nine for an ATX board. In some PC cases, only six of these mounting holes can be utilized."

Actually it does have 7 mounting holes, but the middle-right one couldn't be utilized. If you look carefully at the last picture you'll see the board isn't quite long enough to reach the last standoff.

Good review! I still think a DS3 is a good alternative for users on a strict budget and can't afford P35. Just a few thoughts for owning one for about six months:

1) VRM cooling I think is a major problem. I haven't seen other users complain of this, but I noticed that the underside of my mobo is discolored right under where the mosfets are. Pic 1, Pic 2, Pic 3. I got some tiny heatsinks on as soon as I saw this.

2) An Infinity pointing up with a fan and a HR-05 does not work. I had to bend the HR-05 just to cram it in. This is the only way I could fit the Infinity on this board. The fan hit my first stick of memory when blowing to the rear exhaust. The bent HR-05 can only be a temporary solution, as a slight touch to the HR-05 will either lift its base from the NB or block the fan. (I'm creating a thread about this soon)

3) I also have a E4400 but couldn't get a higher FSB than 375 regardless of which multiplier or voltages I used. I've been told that Allendales don't like high FSB's....

I disagree with recommending motherboards like this for silence. I think motherboards recommended for silence should have low power consumption. 72W at idle is a high power consumption for a computer that is doing nothing. If it were at full load with two hard drives it would be respectable but not idle. (Why test with two hard drives by the way?)

I'd rather keep my P5W DH Deluxe than buy this... review a P35 mobo instead

Edit: Maybe the Abit IP35 is a good mobo review candidate? it looks really good

Any additional reviews are always welcome! Thanks for your feedback. As mentioned previously, I would stick with the solid p35 chipsets, as their reviews have generally been excellent.

This surely isn’t standard! Most people buy ready made PCs which typically come with one of each drive. I would prefer to see the main data shown for one of each drive with supplementary data for multiple drives.

The system idled at 58W with only one of each drive type which is low for a system with dedicated graphics.

With no support for Penryn as of yet it does seem a risk to buy one of these if you require top end performance in the future with low power consumption. If your needs are ‘only’ for 3GHz dual-core then this shouldn’t be an issue.
A review of a P35 board to contrast with this ‘older’ board would make a nice comparison.

What revision is the E4400 that you used? M0 is the latest.

Yes - I know some people have been complaining about the lack of new reviews here, but I'm a bit puzzled by this one. Not that there's anything wrong with the review itself, but aside from a nod to the "silent" aspect with the undervolting paragraph, just about everything to do with the GA-965P-DS3(R) has been covered exhaustively many months ago at numerous other tech sites.

The board has effectively been superceded anyway by the GA-P35-DS3R at the same price point, and I can't see why anyone would choose it in preference (assuming you can even still find one).

On the other hand, a comparison of various current mobos, including power consumption, heat dissipation, undervoltability, onboard fan controls, compatibility with Speedfan and so on (things that are usually only mentioned in passing if at all at mainstream tech sites, with their emphasis on overclocking) would be much more useful...

I'm getting a P35-DS3R soon, so I can report on undervolting, fan controls, and power consumption (with my Kill-A-Watt).

I would have agreed with that, except now there are very cheap p35 mobos from gigabyte. Look at the DS3L, it's only $95, which is pretty much the same price as P965 boards...or cheaper actually because it seems P965's are $105. Also don't forget that a lot of the P35 boards have lower power components for VRM's, which should make adding cooling less neccessary.

why not review the S3 board? S3 rev 3.3 is about 1/4 cheaper than DS3, and still has 6 phase power and solid caps for CPU.

i don't think a dozen solid caps elsewhere could justify the price difference between S3 & DS3. i reckon S3 board is the "everyone's board" here.

also it'd be interesting to test the temp difference between stock NB cooler and thermalright. also the highest FSB achieved with each of them. i know SPR is not a oc site, but it's still interesting to know. quite a few of the visitors don't just want silent computer, they would like something runs fast and silent.

ty for the review.

In the UK the price is now about the same if you can get them at all. The P35 board pricing also starts at only slightly above this which makes me wonder what the point of buying a P965 boards is at this point. I suppose they’ve had longer to tweak them and make them more stable which may or may not be indicated by the need for 3 revisions of many of the P965 boards!

The P35-(D)S3 boards have more fan headers (3 versus 2), a newer Audio Controller and confirmed Penryn support; that’s worth the £5 premium in my book all other things being equal.

well it probably depends what one can get and at what price.

i bought P965-S3 instead of P35-S3 mainly because P35-S3 has a rev 2.0 coming out soon (not on sale here yet), which is a big concern to me - a major rev update shortly after the introduction, the first batch is probably a bit of rush to take on the market. besides there is no real benefit for me to pick P35 over P965.

i made sure that i'm getting a rev P965-S3 rev3.3 because the upgrade put it nearly side by side with P965-DS3 (rev 3.3). 6 phase power n solid caps for cpu power.

P35-S3 and P965-DS3 have similar price here, and i don't see any reason to choose any of them over the S3 - and i do have 3 fan headers on my S3 and using just 2 (could use just 1 lol).

Um, the rev likely has nothing to do with stability. Most people are reporting their Rev 1 boards to be rock solid. What does change is the parallel and serial ports are gone.

Personally I was quite surprised and impressed with the system's power consumption. With one HDD/optical and a X300 card, its idle power consumption at stock speed is only about 10W higher than my undervolted X2 3600+ system with onboard x1250 graphics. I'd have expected a larger difference than that with a desktop Core 2 Duo. The relatively small increase in power consumption when overclocked is also surprising, that overclock looks worthwhile even for a low noise system.

I was interested to see that thermal glue was used to stick on a rather large HR-05-SLI cooler. This is something I've considered with a different motherboard, but I was afraid that the weight of the cooler could damage the chip. How risky do you think this is?

The Thermalright HR-05-SLI is actually pretty light, and the southbridge chip had a heatspreader over it so there was virtually no possibility of damage. It also came with a soft foam shim for exposed chips (as was the case with the northbridge). It far from the heaviest chipset heatsink I've ever used... I had a Swiftech MCX159 (almost twice the weight of the Thermalright) on an Intel 865 northbridge.

At least as far as the readers are concerned (and not the money you get from the sponsors and such), it does not make sense to make reviews like this. Again (i.e., after that article about that TFT monitor) you should only concentrate to the silence related aspects of products. Like detailing what the provided fan controller software can do, if it is buggy, etc. (And, try more CPU fans if they fit; if you have some at the office. At least the most popular ones...)

And while we are there... you say EasyTune is good Well... sure, it has a quite good CPU fan controller, where -- at least! --you can specify two temperatures with corresponding two voltages/percentages (unlike in the BIOS, where you can't specify anything but smartfan on/off and PWM vs DC... I know from practice that the smart CPU control is not smart enough, as it doesn't know the installed fan -- I do know it, but I can't help, due the lack of any related BIOS options). The only little problem with EasyTune is that it abandons fan regulation (giving it back to the BIOS smartfan in effect) after coming out from hibernation (for how long is that reported bug present, dear Gigabyte?), and that the whole EasyTune occasionally crashes when XP starts (not when coming out from hibernation). These has nothing to do with this mobo, these are bugs in the EasyTune software, so it applies to other GigaByte mobos as well, including non-Intel ones. So one has to think that they don't give a sh*t about good fan control, and hence about silence. (But really, which mobo manufacturer does? Any idea?) Another "interesting" feature of EasyTune is how damn ugly it looks, and how impractical it's GUI is in general. However, I wish it were twice as ugly (yeah, that require a talented designer), but technically less buggy. Too bad they can't employ some programmers to fix it.

Nice review, I like the way it was nice and varied.

@MikeC:Usefull review. I would love to see that SPCR would compare more MB (or chipsets) while keeping other components the same.

I'm thinking to go with 650i SLI chipset.
Any chance that you review of Gigabyte GA-N650SLI-DS4 MB?

Is it really true that nvidia chipsets draw 20W-30W more than Intel chipsets.

Got my P35-DS3R Rev 1.0

Some notes:
- 2 more SATA ports over the DS3
- Some connector locations are changed (audio in connectors)
- Beefier northbridge sink (nearly twice the size)

I was able to fit a Scythe Ninja Rev A. without clearance issues. It came very very close to the NB sink.

As for power consumption:

Components:
E6700 B2 -- 266x10 @ 1.15V BIOS, 1.072V CPU-Z loaded, 1.088V CPU-z idle
X1900XT -- Stock
2 GB DDR2-800 -- 2.05V
40 GB Seagate 7200.7 IDE
LG DVD-ROM
S12-600W

** NO ADDITIONAL FANS RUNNING: I have a water on the CPU. I unplugged the pump and fans to take readings of as little as possible.

LOAD: 132W
IDLE: 104W
Measured from the wall with a Kill-A-Watt P3.

Running Vista X64. EIST, C1E enabled, so it clocked down to 266x6 for idle.

Still trying to figure out the Smart Fan BIOS options to see if i can control the fan speeds manually

Thanks for the review- since I went with an AM2/690G based GigaByte Mobo for my HTPC, I've been curious as to how it would have turned out if I went C2D.

In my case, undervolting (~1 volt/1200 MHz stable) a Brisbane 4000+ which is passively cooled with a Rev B. Ninja results in CPU temps 25-30 C in normal (as an HTPC, no gaming, with some RDP, Photoshop and Dreamweaver) use, with system temps around 30-35C. I'm not sure what I would have gained by shelling out the extra cash for a BE-2350.

Somewhat related blathering...
FSP ZEN 80 PS, Onboard Video, Pioneer DVR112D, 3GB PC6400 RAM, 80 Mb 2.5 inch Fujistu in a Scythe Enclosure, Antec NSK24xx, 2x120 Noctua NF-S12-800's oriented for positive pressure. SmartFan set to: 25-50C 0-100%. I use a network share to store recordings, had to hack a couple of registry settings to get that to work properly.

Every review I've seen has said the p35 has higher power consumption than the p965. Given the lack of stunning advantages for the p35 over the p965, why wouldn't one choose the p965? Perhaps if one has a 45nm CPU with 1333 FSB, but otherwise the p35 really brings nothing to the table other than higher power.

I'd just like to report that SpeedFan 4.33 correctly displays fan speed.

My fans actually spin at 800rpm, not 450000! Who knew?!