opinions of Gigabyte P35-DS3R

recently I have purchased a professional water cooling system: mcp355, gtz, mcw60, mcr320 and some MC14 ramsinks for the video card ram cooling.

unfortuntaely there was a leak in the video card water block, strangely the leak itself did not cause any damage, but after I noticed it I shut down the system and fixed the leak then dried the parts, but when re-plugged the sound card (SBlive 5.1 value) onto which the water leaked, after some time the sound card went up in smoke, and unfortunately burned the plastic of the pci slot on which it was located.

I have some degree of confidence that I have fixed the damage to the board, however I do not wish to risk my equipment and use it for long-term reliability, even if the damage may have been fixed (I don't dare find out to prevent possible damage to the PSU).

the board that was burned is the Abit IP35-E, which I can't find anywhere for sale at the moment (but the option I do have looks maybe better depends on your input), which is the Gigabyte P35-DS3R, basically the difference between them are: double the SATA ports 8 instead of 4, NCQ support, two RAIDs, ultra durable all solid capacitors every where, 6-phase (compared to 4-phase on IP35-E) cooling-free cpu power supply, very large northbridge heatsink.

but that board has (or does it ?) a nasty drawback which may be more important despite being a northbridge based architecture, is the lower memory performance than most if not all other p35 boards, including the asus, unfortuntaely I don't like asus very much because they tend to pack it with lots of things on the board that I have no use for, and they don't seem to be designed much for overclocking, but the memory performance drawback is not the only drawback, the gigabyte boards do seem to have lower overclocking efficiency, despite deing highly overclockable, apparently it applies to all gigabyte boards, but I did find at least one review which does not show that in the test, but I can't make it out, so I was wondering if anyone has any better information in this matter.

the equipment (which was luckily not damaged from the leak problem) that goes into the board is:

CPU : Intel E6750
Video: Sapphire HD 3870
Audio : ESI Juli@
PSU: Corsair VX450W (450W 80+)
RAM: Corsair Twin2x6400C4 (800 mhz, EPP 4-4-4-12 @ 2.1V)

I found the Gigabyte P35-DS3R from a dude that sells me it for 75$ and it has 2 more years of warranty left.

I would say go for the Gigabyte. If you want a really nice overclocking board, try to get a P45. Abit was shut down by their parent corporation quite some time ago, so you will be hard pressed to find any of their boards around anymore. I love my Gigabyte board so much, that I have been building clients rigs with them as well, and if I don't have faith in a product I will not sell it, and I haven't had a single one come back yet.

well, I did, it's all true, the memory performance is the worst you can imagine, about the difference between the AMD memory controller and Intel chipset-based architecture, which is ~60 cycles, the difference between the IP35-E and GA-P35-DS3R is ~50 cycles , looks like the fancy electronic components have drawbacks, or maybe it's something else ?

maybe someone knows if this can be fixed ?

edition: updated BIOS from version F4 to F13 and now memory performance is even better than the Abit board, under same settings and voltages comparing to the Abit board, read bandwidth increased by 950 MB/s !!!!! from 8450 to 9400, write bandwidth didn't changed and is same bandwidth as the Abit board, copy bandwidth is also the same, latency maybe 1 ns higher (in terms of clocks, at 32MB with 512 stride, increased by 2 clocks (208) compared to the Abit - 206).

the only thing that appears to be wrong and didn't change in the bios update is the C1E EIST, it doesn't reduce voltage much.

p.s. I am surprised gigabyte don't advertise their BIOS....