PCB Design and Functionality
When getting down to discussing a mainboard that represents the very base of the product family, most of you may get ready for the worst. In this case most makers usually try to save some textolite and fit all the necessary components onto a smaller area that may lead to funny and sometimes sad results. Supposedly, the users should put up with all the drawbacks for the sake of lower product price. However, we should give Gigabyte engineers due credit for breaking this unannounced rule: Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L layout is designed in practically classical way.
Even those Gigabyte mainboards that have no letter D before the series name, use solid-state capacitors in the processor voltage regulator circuitry. As for the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L, it doesn’t have a single traditional electrolytic capacitor onboard. By the way, Gigabyte believes to be the leader in manufacturing mainboards with solid-state capacitors.
Gigabyte developers do not repeat their earlier mistake, when there were multiple contacts hanging below the LGA775 processor socket on the bottom of the PCB. If you remember, a cooler with a metal backplate could close some of these contacts and put the entire system out of order. Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L boasts clean and even surface below the processor socket. There are a few embossed contacts along the line between the retention holes, but they are unlikely to hinder installation of cooler backplates.
The chipset North Bridge is cooled with an aluminum heatsink. Despite its size, it heated up quite tangibly during our test session. The cooler ICH9 South Bridge does well with a small heatsink.
We managed to find only one eye-catching design flaw around the chipset South Bridge: very low placed IDE connector powered by the JMicron 368 controller. The cable going through the entire system case to the optical drive that is usually located at the top doesn’t look too good and hinders proper air flow inside the case. If you still have a Parallel ATA hard disk drive, you will have really hard times trying to connect it together with a CD- or DVD-ROM device. However, this will hardly be an issue pretty soon, when IDE HDDs vanish from the market and SATA optical devices become more and more widely spread.
Fewer SATA connectors (only 4) is hardly a serious issue for Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L mainboard, as there are not that many users who have more than four hard disk drives in their system. Other than that the design of the lower PCB part is excellent. We were especially pleased with three PCI slots for expansion cards. Cards with this interface are still more popular than PCI-E and two slots may be not enough in some cases, although most mainboards out there offer only two.
You will be even more excited about the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L mainboard rear panel that features a parallel and a series port, PS/2 connectors for keyboard and mouse, four USB ports, a network RJ45 connector and six audio jacks. It is nice to see the optical and coaxial SPDIF outs that are a rare thing in base mainboard models these days.
I suggest that you take another pleased look at the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L layout. Note the power supply connectors that are exactly where they are supposed to be and four fan connectors. There are not three fan connectors, like on many other mainboards, and not two, like on entry level solutions, but all four.
Mainboards do not need any additional illumination, but Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L could use at least one LED indicator for the power status. Although, this is just our suggestion, not a requirement or a flaw.
