GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS4 Rev. 2.0

I am thinking about picking up board for my E6600. I am more concerned with stability than overclocking, so I am wondering if anyone has any experience with the board. Is it pretty stable? How is the chipset cooling?

Also, it's hard to tell with some of these boards, but will the Zalman CNPS9500 fit on this board? I am switching to air after being water cooled for a while, and I know some air solutions have trouble with some of the new motherboards.

It's a very nice board in that price range, beats the heck out of the P5K vanilla boards, pretty good new improved heatsink, mine came bundled together with F7 bios, at least this board didn't have any issues with the dreaded PCI-1x bug like some of the DS3's...

I didn't test the board thoroughly as I didn't have much time with it ( was for a fellow gamer ), waht I did test : it did 400FSB on my E6850 out of the box and handled the clients Q6600 with 333FSB with no changes to the voltages whatsoever... though the heatsink became hotter than with the dual core... before I delivered it to the client it folded for 3 consecutive days with the OC and didn't budge once...

Also the board handled my Gskills PC8000 2 gig kit, with the DS3 I had issues with them to run at 1000mhz at 4-4-4-5 settings, the DS4 was rockstable...

The thermalright ultra 120 and extreme versions fitted fine and I would recommend those coolers over the Zalman 9700 as they are lighter , better performing and quieter than the Zalman, but you need a pretty big case, so make sure you got the room...

From my point of view great board at a good price ...



Here's a piccie of the board fitted with the Ultra 120 (don't look at the mess )

Board ran fine with the following :

Gigabyte DS4 rev 2.0 F7 Bios (stock)
Q6600@3ghz with Thermalright Ultra eXtreme cooler
2 Gig Gskill PC6400 4-4-3-5
2 x 500Gb Seagate 7200.10 16Mb S-ATA hard drives
Nec 18X S-ATA DVD Burner
BFG 8800GTS 640 OC2 vidcard
OCZ 600 GameXtream power supply
Antec 900 gamers case

I agree, ditch the Zalman. Go with one of these instead:

$35 - Scythe SCNJ-1100P Ninja Plus Rev.B CPU HSF (optional $7 Thermalright LGA775 Bolt-Thru-Kit; recommended if using w/ quadcore)
$45 - Tuniq Tower 120 CPU HSF
$46 - Thermalright Ultima 90 CPU HS + FBA09A12M - Z ($3)
$55 - Thermalright Ultra 120 eXtreme CPU HS + Scythe S-Flex Fan SFF21E ($15)

I actually highly recommend the Ultima90 + Panaflo fan. It performed as good as my Tuniq, but its lighter, smaller, and easier to install.

Every one of those is huge. I don't really want something that bulky. Do I really need a huge cooler like that if I don't plan to overclock at all?

Oh, also, I forgot to ask. Has anyone run this board with 4GB of RAM? Does it downclock the FSB to 333 like some boards do? Does it stay stable with all the banks filled?

If you think those are bulky, why get the Zalman?!? lol... The Ultima90 is much smaller than the Zalman, and even cools better.

if you're not overclocking, all you need is the stock cooler.

I've run the DS3R with 4GB of both G.Skill NQ (1.8v) sticks as well as Crucial Ballistix (2.2v). My OCs held for 400Mhz FSB SDR (E6400 @ 3.2Ghz, 1600Mhz FSB QDR) and 475Mhz FSB SDR (E6750 @ 3.8Ghz, 1900Mhz FSB QDR).

Bump for more user feedback...
This mobo is on my radar even though the price went up $20 overnight at Egg the other day
I need to replace my fairly new 650i DS4 which is completly flakey and unstable as sh*t.
This is for a music production box so I need to hear about its stability from more than a couple users if i can.
The dual-firewire caught my eye as I'd be using it for an audio interface.

Anyone else rocking this board with an X-fi or an ATi card?
I suspect its one of the two giving me my continous hardware error dumps and blue-screens.
The 650i DS4 was the first Gigabyte board I was not pleased with and I'd like to blame nVidia for the crap chipset and give GB the benefit of the doubt

Thanx in advance.

Got my DS4 in last week and installed everything saturday. Board was easy to set up and no problems installing vista ultimate 64. I do have 4x1GB of RAM but only installed 2x1GB for now. Want to overclock and get things stable before I add the other two.

Keep me posted how that goes Raptor. I thought about running U64 as well w/ 4gb. Let me know if it still clocks well w/ 4 stix. Thanks!