Gigabyte GA-P35-S3L Review: Features, Opinions, and Overclocking
The Gigabyte GA-P35-S3L
I was asked a few times to give out some information on this board whenever I received it, and after finally getting my Q6600, I could put my rig together and get going.
Features
The Gigabyte GA-P35-S3L is Gigabyte's latest P35 budget board. Coming in at around $87 on Newegg, you wouldn't expect much from it, but for a budget board, it has been quite amazing. The package contents contain the motherboard, an instruction book, a few sheets with some information, a driver CD, two SATA cables, an IDE cable, a Gigabyte-branded IDE cable, and a Gigabyte-branded floppy cable, pretty much everything you need. Now, there are a few reasons the GA-P35-S3L is cheaper than its counterpart, the GA-P35-DS3L. The most prominent reason is lack of an onboard RAID controller, as does the GA-P35-DS3L. The GA-P35-S3L also has 4 less SATA ports than the GA-P35-DS3L, which has 8. The GA-P35-S3L lacks some other things in general, such as two PCI-E slots, and a second IDE slot.
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The GA-P35-S3L in all its glory.
Pros and Cons
Now, moving away from features, I'd like to talk about some pros and cons of the board itself. My major problem with this board is the placement of the IDE port. It is so far down, and without an extra long ATA cable, there is no way it will reach two optical drives in the top slots of a Mid-Tower ATX case. I managed to use the Master ATA port on the lower of my two drives, leaving one entirely useless. The second most annoying thing was that the ethernet driver found on the CD terribly throttled my internet speeds, and I had to go to the Gigabyte website, download the driver, uninstall the CD version, and reinstall with the new one, since the "new" one was actually an older version; This rectified the problem. I also found it strange that the CMOS clear jumper is only two pins on this motherboard, and actually lacks a jumper entirely, so you'll need your own if you want to clear your CMOS. The only other thing I can think of is the Southbridge heatsink is somewhat meager. Aside those few cons, I've found a lot of good things about the board. First off, it supports 4-pin SmartFan technology for the CPU and a System fan, and the 3-pin fan power are plentiful. The SATA ports are in a great position, not in the way if you have a big graphics card, and right next to the drive bay on most PCs. The onboard sound is great, it has 6 native sound ports on the back supporting 7.1 surround, so if you have surround sound and don't want to buy a sound card, this motherboard would be great for you. It also has 2 PS2 ports onboard, so if you're not using a USB keyboard and mouse, you'll be fine. I could go on and on about how great this board is, but I'll move on to what everyone wants to hear...
Overclocking and Performance
Now, I'll say first off I'm not a great overclocker, and I'm not sure of the exact potential of this board, or even my chip. I'm just posting the results I got, and what this board did for me. If you want a "guaranteed" higher overclock, you might want to look into some of the other recommended boards on the forum. Anyways, on to the overclocking.
The setup I used on these tests is the GA-P35-S3L, a Q6600 B3 with the stock heatsink and some AS5, 2x1GB Crucial Ballistix DDR800, and a 7800GTX 256MB as the video card, though that doesn't matter much. The first thing I did was a quick bench at stock, nothing amazing. Now remember, the Gigabyte BIOS requires a key combination to unlock all the features. You need to press Ctrl+F1 to get to the advanced stuff. The BIOS is quite navigable once you get used to it. It contains 2.00, 2.40, 2.50, 3.0, 3.20, 3.33, 4.0+ and 4.0~ RAM timings. The 4.0+ and 4.0~ timings appear to be for different RAM strappings or something. So, when I did my first overclock on it, I decided to just knock it up to 2.6GHz from 2.4GHz, since I was fairly sure the parts could handle it no problem. It did, and I have no screenshots or results from 2.6, sorry. Now I kicked it up a notch to 2.8, it was totally rock solid at this point, although my Q6600 was getting HOT! It was even very hot at stock (47C idle, 72C load). So then it was time to break the 3Ghz barrier. I kicked up the FSB to 334, set my RAM timings, and hoped it would work...
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3GHz barrier broken...
At this point, the board did not seem to be holding me back. I managed to keep RAM timings relatively tight and the speed jacked up, bump up the FSB, and be rock solid at 3.0GHz. Now, my Q6600's temperatures were another story...
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Idle/Load temps at 3GHz. Holy crap, that is HOT!
Fortunately for everyone else, that probably won't be a problem, and it's not the fault of the motherboard, just the price I pay for having a Q6600 B3 and poor stock cooling.
Now, I did manage to get to 3.2GHz using a 356FSB, but that was about as far as I got.
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You don't even want to see the temperatures...
Unfortunately, I was unable to boot into 3.4GHz, but I think this is the fault of my poor cooling, the temps were ridiculously hot, and I'm serious. Perhaps it is even the "FSB Wall" everyone talks about. I don't know, you'll have to ask someone else with the board. I didn't try 3.3GHz yet, but I plan to go further after I get some better cooling and do some more tweaking in the BIOS. 3.2GHz was not stable for me at the time.
The End Result
Well, I'm not done working on overclocking this board, but all in all, I really think it is a solid board. If you put aside the few cons, you have a lot of stuff to look forward to in this board. The overclocking results might have been meager for some people, but for me, I'm surprised it got this far and didn't fail on me like all my other components usually have. It may have some more hidden overclocking potential I can't get to because of my cooling and chip, so I recommend others to try it out and see what they can do! The board is really cheap, and it's a P35 so it supports Penryn.
I give the board a 4/5 and encourage others to try it. Good job Gigabyte! :clap:
Update #1
After being asked to check to see how high I could get my FSB, I did a little testing. I attempted 7x458 for a CPU speed of 3.2GHz. Unfortunately, this was unstable, and while I could get past the Windows boot screen, when I got into Windows at the desktop, it caused a crash. Luckily, I lowered the FSB down to 450, and I was able to do 7x450 for 3150MHz, this appears to be stable. The BIOS reported my RAM voltage failing at 458FSB (using auto voltage setting) so I may be able to get the FSB a little higher if I messed with the voltages myself. This board may have some great overclocking potential, but I appear to be limited by my chip/cooling.
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Woot, 450 Front Side Bus!
If anyone has any suggestions for this review, or any questions, please let me know, I'll try to cover them to the best of my ability.
