GA-P35-DS3L vs GA-965P-S3

Both of these boards are cheap and locally available to me.

I haven't done any overclocking since I overclocked my Celeron 200 MHz to 266 MHz with a simple FSB change in 1998 or so.

Now I want to play a bit and I have got a Celeron 420 sitting on my shelf with 2 GB of Corsair Twin2X matched memory. I also have a nice 400W Fortron PSU.

I've read about taking the Celeron 420 from 1.6 to 3 GHz on air. This was the reason I bought this stuff. I can afford more expensive parts but I want to play the optimization of cpu and economics game.

Now to the main topic, which board is better, the GA-P35-DS3L or the GA-965P-S3 ? Both are the same price.

Also, I don't want to game with this computer since I have other computers for that. Can I buy a simple PCI (not PCI-E) card and get vga display and will I be able to overclock the same? I want to spend about 20 bucks on display since I want to run code on this box that will just crunch through strings and light maths.

I like the GA-965P-S3 better straight off the bat because of the 6 SATA ports. I may use this computer for something else later (as usual).

Thanks for reading this essay and for your thoughts in advance

The GA-P35-DS3L has the newer chipsets, it has 4xsata unless you really need the extra 2, but it doesn't support Raid and the GA-965P-S3 does. The P35 will support the new 45nm Penryn processors, if you were thinking of to upgrading it to that in a few months. I guess it really comes down to what this comp will end up doing in the end.

whfrazier said:

The GA-P35-DS3L has the newer chipsets, it has 4xsata unless you really need the extra 2, but it doesn't support Raid and the GA-965P-S3 does. The P35 will support the new 45nm Penryn processors, if you were thinking of to upgrading it to that in a few months. I guess it really comes down to what this comp will end up doing in the end.

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I don't need RAID, since it will just have one cheap hard drive in it to hold a working set of data. If the hard drive fails it's a non-issue. I'll go with the GA-P35-DS3L, everyone seems to love it, and as you said, it'll support newer processors.

p965 also supports 45nm, we were guessing some time ago it wouldnt.. asus has bios's realease for 45nm cpu support on p965/975x chipsets. it will be after the offical cpu release when gigabyte does the same. in the end the P35 ocs better in general then p965.