Closer Look at Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L

Strange as it might seem, the first impression from the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L (rev. 1.0) mainboard may be a little disappointing. If you go to one of Gigabyte’s official web-sites, you will learn that the same board is available in 2.0 revision. Does it mean you got an outdated product? In a way yes, but we are all in this situation today. When you buy the latest mainboard, graphics card or CPU, you get a solution that was developed at least half a year ago. By the time it arrives into mass market, it get a little outdated, because new models are being in the works already and even newer models are at a development stage. This is an endless process, so I don’t think we should get really upset about it.

So, let’s see what the differences are between various revisions of Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L mainboards:

You have to really look for the differences. Both revisions support 12 USB ports provided by Intel P35 Express chipset, but there are only four of them on the rear panel of the first mainboard revision and 6 of them on the second mainboard revision. And that is the only difference. So, there is nothing to be upset about actually.

Package and Accessories

Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L mainboard is shipped in a small box of standard size for this series. The reverse side of it discusses in detail the Speed, Smart and Safe components of the series. There is a sticker with the model name and features on the front of the box.

The simple model like that isn’t expected to have rich accessories bundle, but nevertheless, the box contains a lot of goodies. The board comes with the following accessories:

• A pair of yellow Serial ATA cables with connector locks;
• Blue FDD and IDE cables with silver Gigabyte logos;
• Rear panel I/O Shield;
• A CD disk with drivers, utilities and other software;
• English-language user’s manual;
• Colorful poster-guide in several languages;
• Boxed Intel cooler installation guide;
• A pair of brand name silver-blue stickers with Gigabyte logo.