PCB Design and Functionality

Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 looks not just good, but terrific:    

Thanks to Ultra Durable 2 technology, the six-phase processor voltage regulator uses only high-quality components that are more efficient and dissipate less heat. The board is built only with solid-state capacitors. The 8- and 24-pin power connectors are very conveniently located, just like the FDD connector. There are five fan connectors on the board, two of them (including the CPU one) are four-pin connectors. The gap between the two PCI Express x16 slots is bigger than usual. The installed graphics card will block the DIMM slot clips, but I would consider it an insignificant drawback at this point.

They used color coded connectors, placed the IDE port horizontally for extra convenience, found a spot for an additional FireWire connector and even thought about implementing LPT and COM as pin-connectors, although you will need to find rear panel brackets for them.

Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 mainboard seems to have simply no drawbacks at all, however, we would like to make a few comments about the Silent-Pipe chipset cooler.

First of all, it will be really hard to install or remove certain CPU coolers, because the processor socket is surrounded by heatpipes and heatsinks around three sides. It is certainly a drawback, but we all know that efficient and quiet cooling requires larger heat dissipating surface area. This is the only reason why we still put up with numerous bulky heatsinks they install onto mainboards these days. So, you should keep in mind that the board may be incompatible with some processor coolers, although we will not call it a drawback, because it was done for our own good.