P35-DS4 rev 2 Not a good board?

L

Lames.

Gawd
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Nov 17, 2007
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I don't see to many threads about anything good or bad about the DS4. I just got mine in last week and it's doing 400FSB on a E6750 on stock volts. The BIOs are a little 'meh' when it comes to doing voltages and stuff but overall I'm liking it so far.

Not many people own the DS4 or?
 
I don't have one but I'll be getting one soon :). Glad you like it. From all my research it seems like a pretty good board, and overclocks very well.
 
I was real close to pulling the trigger on that DS4, but as I posted in another thread, I saw Newegg only had a 30-day replacement policy for it vs the 1-year policy on some other boards. Put a bad taste in my mouth considering I'm rockin a GigaByte 650i DS4 right now that went sour and GB all but forgot about in terms of support IMO. I ended up buying the IX38 instead yesterday.

Your DS4 looks tight. I liked the layout and the oodles of USB's and FW on the back. Glad to hear its working for you. I was like you though, couldn't find any threads for the life of me anywhere that made feel like i wouldn't be abondoned like my last DS4. I just dont see a lot of people that seem to have bought it. They all went for one of the many P35 DS3 flavors...

I wish GB would stop hiding the good BIOS option too. That never made sense to me...
 
Well I was at a toss up between the DS3 Boards, the ABIT P35 boards and the DS4. Reason why I needed a board at all is because I hate being down w/o a computer while I had to RMA my 680i and my Ballistixs. The 680i was frying my RAM(overvolting them) and 2 fan connectors went out on the board and it was the fired revision of the back last December when I bought it.

Since I couldn't really find any threads on these boards(been looking at the boards a long time but just never registered until like 2 days ago) so I was forced to look at newegg reviews and stuff.

Well I also tried finding other benchmark reviews and stuff like that about the DS4 and the ABIT boards. Well I caught rumor that the DS4 had over all better cooling for the N/B and S/B and saw that in a couple different places. So +1 for DS4 so far. Then was looking at ABIT P35 boards and I wanted the Black Pearl Edition one but I don't need the stupid WiFi stuff and so IMO was a waste for me. Yes I know I don't HAVE to use it but still didn't think it was worth the money. Also, I had bad experiences with AMD ABIT boards back when I was building Socket A stuff(Anthlon XP FTW!).

One of my other fellow employee has the GB board that has DDR2 and DDR3 in it(forgot the model) and said he owned a DS4 right before that and he loved it. So I said screw and bought the DS4 knowing I always have buyers remorse about ANYTHING I buy and always Seem to find that the 2nd choice I was debating on was better then what I bought AFTER buying.

But so far I'm loving it to an extent. 2 things bother me.

I tried running 2 things of Orthos to stress test, and usually if the system is not stable, it will just stop the test and flash red. But when I got past about 3 hours, my computer restarted itself for no reason. So I'm trying to figure that out.

Other thing is that the way the put the voltage settings in the BIOs. The CPU voltage setting is the only setting that I can change from like 1.25 to 1.275 and so on...others have to do +.02 volts and stuff like that. It's bugging me out lol.
 
I build a few rigs with the DS4 and it runs great with the Q6600@3ghz, no hickups rock stable with the out of the box F7 bios... I really good mobo for it's price...
 
Great to hear the good reports as I ordered one from the Egg today to replace my Asus P5E that is a pure disaster.
 
Now my only concern is if I went water and wanted to cool the NB and SB..what would I do for the mosfets and stuff that the silent pipe covers?
 
Lames. said:
Now my only concern is if I went water and wanted to cool the NB and SB..what would I do for the mosfets and stuff that the silent pipe covers?
Click to expand...

In fact you don't even need to cool the NB and SB to get amasing overclocks, just a fan in the sidepanel centered on the NB is sufficient... or decent air flow in the case, just go for ya CPU and GPU WC... I don't know how Gigabyte pulled it off but the board runs so much cooler than the P5K DLX I own (prolly due to less heat output on the mosfets)

And there's a huge difference between heatoutput on the NB between a 6850 and a Q6600...
 
leeghoofd said:
And there's a huge difference between heatoutput on the NB between a 6850 and a Q6600...
Click to expand...

Well since the MCH/Northbridge is only sending/receiving data and address information from the CPU to/from the memory and feeding data to the PCI-e video slot, with the same buss regardless of CPU, it interests me as to how a different CPU could have any effect on NB temps if both CPU's were run at the same FSB running the same application(s). I believe that the statement is incorrect.

At FSB over 400 it has pretty much been proved that adding some kind of active cooling, usually a 40mm fan hot melt glued to the NB heatsink is a huge help in obtaining high stable FSB overclocks. This is true of all P965, P35s and the X38 X48 should be no different. That MCH gets HOT and is OCed just as much as the CPU as it also has to deal with running faster as the FSB speed is increased.

If the CPU has a multiplier of 9 or more it is not as critical but at the 8 x 400 sweet spot and above cooling the MCH is a must in a well done machine.

Frankly redoing the heatpipe mounting with good thermal paste and replacing the push pins with real hardware and a fan on the NB is more than sufficient. water cooling the NB is a bit "over the top" but it could not really hurt. I agree you would end up needing airflow on those MosFETs and other VRM components around the CPU area for ensuring stability and reliability (long life). Just another fan positioned so air would hit the mosfets directly, even a low speed 80mm would do the job. The tricky part would be finding a place to mount it. A side panel fan placed (as they typically are) so it is aimed at the CPU area would work fine.

For the southbridge about any small heatsink with or without a fan could be attached with thermal epoxy or find a "universal" graphics chip cooler and make it fit.
 
Back on topic, nothing at all wrong with the DS4, I believe the reason is it is not more popular is that the P965 version was not available in the US so the DS3 was the board to get and that rep has spilled over to the P35's . Its just not as well known. Now the rest below just personal opinion (and we all know what opinions are worth :D )

It seems to me the DS4 offers no great benefit over the DS3 and is not engineered as well in the one area I thought was critical (CPU voltage regulator circuity) as the DQ6. If you never planned on running a quad this would not matter one bit. The DS4 is kind of "stuck in the middle" and while it is an excellent board a lot of people choose to save a few bucks and go with the DS3 which has the rep for good OCing, or decide to toss some extra cash out and go top of the line. I tend to fall into the former camp as I cannot see a second bios chip as worth the difference in price since it is a "cut down" version of the true dual physical bios functions that are on the DQ6. On the DS4 you cannot do anything with the second bios, it is just there in case the primary one fails. This is a great thing, worth $20 IMO but not being able to flash it or choose to boot from it gimps it. That said it should OC as well as the DS3 and does have a couple of "goodies" extra. For instance it shares the same PCB as the DQ6 so is more sophisticated in many areas. Its up to the buyer to decide if those "goodies" are worth the price.

I went with the DQ6 as I keep boards a long time and someday I will slap a quad in it and so I wanted the fancy cpu power circuitry.
 
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