Gigabyte P35-DQ6 (Intel P35)
Author: Aleksandr Mitrofanov
Gigabyte P35-DQ6 Layout and Features
This motherboard stands out with its most massive cooling system we have ever seen. That affected the convenience of assembly: it's a problem to plug in an additional power supply cable.
There may rise issues in installation of some expansion cards into the first PCI Express x1 slot. Another issue is blocking the DIMM slots by the first PCI Express vide card.
We note the additional Molex power connector onboard. It can be activated if two video cards in the Crossfire mode are used.
Near the CPU socket, there is a 4-pin CPU_FAN connector for a matching cooler.
Besides it, there are three 3-pin connectors: PWR_FAN - near the DIMM slots, SYS_FAN1 - in the right-hand corner of the board, and NB_FAN near the north bridge, as well as the 4-pin SYS_FAN2 connector in the left-hand corner of the board.
Note that on the reverse side of the board there is a massive CrazyCool radiator which serves to reject heat off the CPU.
There are also small radiators under the south and north bridges.
The board offers a passive system for cooling the chipset and a power supply module. On the north and south bridges as well as on the power components there are massive radiators; they are all linked with heat pipes, with the largest radiator on the north bridge.
Under the north bridge, there are four 240-pin DIMM slots for DDR2 memory modules. They are partitioned into two groups, each having two slots. The first two slots refer to the first controller channel, with the other two to the second controller.
Note that due to an extended set of multipliers the board supports DDR2-533/640/667/800/888/1066 memory, with overall capacity making 8GB.
There are two PCI Express x16 slots onboard (both with latches) which are meant for video cards.
As we can see, 16 bus lines (served by the north bridge) are allocated to the first slot. To implement the second slot, the developers have enabled 4 PCI Express lines from the south bridge. If we look inside the second port, we can see that as much as half of the pins are missing.
This can be demonstrated schematically:
As you can see, the lines are allocated only if PCI Express x1 slots are not used. Switching between the lines is done with two special chips (a PCI Express switch):
Therefore, engineers at Gigabyte created a potential for running two video cards following the NVIDIA SLI or AMD Crossfire technologies (currently, only the Crossfire is supported). Besides the above listed slots, Gigabyte P35-DQ6 uses two more "regular" PCI slots as well as three PCI Express x1 slots.
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CPU & Memory:
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