Verdict: A great overclocker at a bargain price.

The P35 is one of Intel's best chipsets of recent years, as boards that are based around it are sensibly priced, fast and incredibly overclockable. As such, it should come as no surprise that leading motherboard manufacturers have produced a wide range of products based around it, and one such manufacturer is Gigabyte.

The GA-P35-DS3P sits in the middle of this range. It isn't quite a bargain basement model, but neither is it weighed down by spurious features, such as several dozen USB 2 ports and a small army of eSATA ports, as is often the case on high-end Gigabyte motherboards. In fact, the GA-P35-DS3P has 12 USB 2 ports and not an eSATA port in sight, although it has eight RAID-capable S-ATA II ports and a single EIDE port.

To keep down costs, the GA-P35-DS3P uses the DDR2 version of the P35 chipset, although it retains CrossFire support. However, as the second 16x PCI-E slot only has four PCI-E lanes, this will limit dual-graphics performance compared with a motherboard with two 16x PCI-E slots. There are also two PCI slots and three 1x PCI-E slots if you don't like the look of the on-board Intel HD Audio codec or single Gigabit Ethernet LAN port.

In keeping with the GA-P35-DS3P's low-cost origins, the VRMs are left exposed to the elements, although the Northbridge sports a substantial copper heatsink.

Like most P35-based motherboards, the GA-P35-DS3P is a good performer at its stock settings, and a great overclocker. Unfortunately, the BIOS doesn't specify absolute values, instead opting to display the extent to which you can overvolt each component. For example, the RAM can be overvolted by 1.55V, the Northbridge by 0.375V and the FSB by 0.35V. Nonetheless, we were able to overclock the FSB to a heady 520MHz by boosting the Northbridge and FSB voltages to maximum. This is an impressive achievement considering the GA-P35-DS3P's mere £86 price tag but, given that the VRMs aren't cooled, we doubt that the little blighters would last more than a few months before burning out at these settings.

The GA-P35-DS3P is very cheap for a P35 motherboard, and a great overclocker too, but you'd need to use additional cooling for the VRMs if you intended to run it overclocked and overvolted for months on end.

• PSUs - 14th July 2008
• Multi-GPU graphics - 20th June 2008
• CPU water cooling - 17th June 2008
• Hard disks - 20th March 2008
• Audio hardware - 29th February 2008
• Graphics cards - 24th January 2008
• CPUs - 21st December 2007

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