Your expert advice ? (ip 35 pro or GA-P35-DS4) ?

[Samsonid]

What is the consensus comparing these two boards ?

For example what do you think of Gigabyte manufacturing quality such as the:
UltraDurable2 features (Lower Rds(on) MOSFET, Ferrite core, Solid Capacitors) ?

How does the Abit board compare ? Any reliability issues you know of ?

The Abit manual seems a little more clear (more friendly in my opinion) and the BIOS entries seem to be a little better worded (for instance in the "Standard CMOS features" it lists SATA channels 1-6, which makes sense, whereas the Gigabyte lists IDE 1-5, but there is only one IDE header, so I am already confused) ... but I also hear the Abit board can have issues such as uGuru corrupting the BIOS settings ?

I see some comments here but they are mostly layout complaints.

 

[de8212]

Those were the two I narrowed it down to as well. I went with the ds4 rev 2 and am awaiting it now.
In the research Idid I believe either board would be a good decision.

I know that doesnt help you make up your mind. I'm also curious what others have to say.

 

[Samsonid]

What was it that made you lean towards the ds4 ?

 

[Samsonid]

Ok, I went with the GA-P35-DS4 board. This was a very close decision. Either board would work just fine, being so close it is only the little things that tip the scale (like the layout of the ports in the back, the number of USBs etc) Also, I found out the heatsink on Abit is not copper (it is painted to look like copper) and the BIOS updates on the Abit maybe a little more difficult.

 

[buddhatb]

Those are the same two boards I am deciding on as well. Kind of leaning towards the IP35 Pro at the moment, but still not 100% certain.


Samsonid and de8212, when you guys get your board in, could you please update this thread with your opinions about the board. I would like to hear your impressions of the DS4 and how your build went.

 

[Samsonid]

Not problem.
I placed my order today and will let you know when I get it up and running.

 

[CRXican]

I've been reading everything I can about these boards as well both here and at another forum (H). I've seen the GA-P35-DS3R recommended quite a bit. The fact that is has a bunch of nasty legacy ports hanging around is part of the reason I've looked beyond it to the DS4 model. The DS4 includes firewire (don't really need but nice for my external HD) and RAID (I don't use it).

One thing that has me shying away from the IP35 Pro at the moment is the PSU issue mentioned in this thread:
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...=2063989&enterthread=y

I have the Corsair HX620 sitting on my wish list on newegg because of the amazing support and great reviews I've seen about it. I guess the question is do I give up a good PSU or a good motherboard?

From what I've read thus far, nothing on the IP35 Pro makes it worth ditching a great PSU for so I'm leaning more towards the DS4 at the moment and plan to keep reading up on it.

 

[Samsonid]

Corsair makes some awesome PSUs ... I used to be a PC_power_&_Cooling advocate, but ever since Corsair came out I was sold.


The Corsair HX620 is fantastic ... I would go for the 520HX as well !

 

[yyrkoon]

The IP35 Pro seems to have issues with the larger Raptors HDDs, and I have seen some posts indicating that there may also be issues with the X-FI sound cards.

That being said, I own an ABIT IP35-E, which aside from all the bells and whistles, it is supposed to be a equally capable board. If you're into Overclocking, I cannot see a better board than the IP35-E/Pro boards. I took my E6550 from 2.33Ghz to 3.33Ghz with stock cooler, stock voltages, just by dropping the FSBRAM settings to 1:1, bumping up the MCH one notch because of slight vdroop, and raising the external clock to 475Mhz. It was that simple . . . The CPU runs a little on the warm side at ~60C under 100% load for two hours, but is 100% stable, and has been running without a hitch for the last week or so since I purchased it/installed WinXP.

Anyhow, when I say that I liked my ABIT NF-M2 nView + AM2 1210 Opteron very much, it is saying a lot when I say I like this system much better now with this CPU/Motherboard. The board does not have SLI, no onboard RAID, and No eSATA ports . . . but I can live with that knowing that I paid ~$100 less for the motherboard ; )

Lots of people seem to think ABIT motherboards are much much simpler to setup, and much easier to overclock with. I personally do not have any problems with Gigabyte, and I did seriously consider purchasing this same board you're now considering, but it came down to price, and the fact that I have been using mostly ABIT baords for many years(read: over 12 years), and have been quite happy using them for this period of time.

 

[Heidfirst]

The Pro has 100% solid caps too - I wouldn't let Gigabyte's marketing sway you there.

The potential issue with the Corsair PSUs (remember that we are talking about very small nos. in terms of either boards or PSUs shipped) may be nothing more than just normal failure rates or just a board at th edge of it's accepted tolerances meeting a PSU at the edge of it's.
At any event it's been reported on other than abit mobos & indeed other than P35 mobos too.

Depending upon which revision DS4 you get you iirc may also get smaller heatsinks than originally.
& tbh I don't see any difference in difficulty in updating the BIOS on either.

Another pro for the Pro is the abit USA forum ( I may be biased as I'm a Mod there but imo it's 1 of the best forum communities around).

They are both good boards but you may also want to check out the DS3P or the standard IP35 ($100 at mwave after rebate) if you can do without some of the nice but not really necessary touches on the dearer mobos.

 

[emfiend]

I've been reading a lot about these boards as well. I just put in my order for the DS4 last weekend. It seemed everything important to me came up as a tie between these two.

The con for the IP35Pro was that I was hooking up to a gigabit lan and I would be moving around some big files between computers. Abit's nic is on PCI whereas the Gigabyte is on the PCI-E. The benchmarks seem to differ by about 30% favoring the DS4.

The con for the DS4 was the cable management.

In the end, I decide I could live with an ugly case but could not live with having to wait 1 extra minute for a 20 GB file transfer.

 

[Miramonti]

I went with the Abit Pro over gigabyte mainy for two reasons - it seemed at the time [july] to have the least installation/configuration/compatability problems or issues over gigabyte and asus, and was noted to be a great overclocker with low temps and solid stability. I needed it for work and was easily willing to sacrifice the few extra benchmark points that asus and gigabyte often scored over the abit board.

It has become one of the best tech desisions I've made in a long time. Installation for me was seemless and the board has been rock solid since. My only glitch was learning that I had to start booting with 1 memory stick before I got up to 4 sticks. I definitely enjoy the extras that come with the Pro version (altho that's not why I went with Abit over the other two brands.) As far as I know I would have enjoyed the gigabyte as much, but I definitely didn't go wrong with the abit pro.

 

[SerpentRoyal]

Originally posted by: emfiend
I've been reading a lot about these boards as well. I just put in my order for the DS4 last weekend. It seemed everything important to me came up as a tie between these two.

The con for the IP35Pro was that I was hooking up to a gigabit lan and I would be moving around some big files between computers. Abit's nic is on PCI whereas the Gigabyte is on the PCI-E. The benchmarks seem to differ by about 30% favoring the DS4.

The con for the DS4 was the cable management.

In the end, I decide I could live with an ugly case but could not live with having to wait 1 extra minute for a 20 GB file transfer.

The bottleneck is the READ/WRITE speed of your HDD...not the LAN. IP35-E is only $61 AR. It's basically an IP35 Pro (same power circuit) minus bells and whistles. LAN is on PCI-E.

 

[emfiend]

Yeah. I briefly considered the IP35-E. But there's no firewire and fewer number of USB ports, both important for me since I'm doing mostly video/photo editing with external drives. In this case, the expandability was important. Didn't mention this since OP asked about the two other boards.

I'm not sure I follow about the read/write. Data access doesn't always have to involve HD read/write (correct me if I'm wrong). Using a NAS, I could hit the theoretical limit of the NIC, no?

 

[Heidfirst]

The last review that I saw of the IP35 Pro against another board (P5K) using PCI-E LAN had throughput at only 14% less.
It was still 81MB/s which is faster than a single HDD (except a Raptor) can handle.

 

[SerpentRoyal]

Originally posted by: emfiend
Yeah. I briefly considered the IP35-E. But there's no firewire and fewer number of USB ports, both important for me since I'm doing mostly video/photo editing with external drives. In this case, the expandability was important. Didn't mention this since OP asked about the two other boards.

I'm not sure I follow about the read/write. Data access doesn't always have to involve HD read/write (correct me if I'm wrong). Using a NAS, I could hit the theoretical limit of the NIC, no?

IP35-E has more USB ports...up to 12. 1394 is only 10% faster than USB 2.0. My IP35 Pro is stuck around 14MB/s with 1394 (Initio chipset with 12 BIOS). Same external HDD hits 31MB/s with USB 2.0.

Get a quality 1394 card if you're serious about video/photo. Even with the extra card, IP35-E is still much cheaper than IP35 Pro.

 

[emfiend]

Originally posted by: SerpentRoyal

Originally posted by: emfiend
Yeah. I briefly considered the IP35-E. But there's no firewire and fewer number of USB ports, both important for me since I'm doing mostly video/photo editing with external drives. In this case, the expandability was important. Didn't mention this since OP asked about the two other boards.

I'm not sure I follow about the read/write. Data access doesn't always have to involve HD read/write (correct me if I'm wrong). Using a NAS, I could hit the theoretical limit of the NIC, no?

IP35-E has more USB ports...up to 12. 1394 is only 10% faster than USB 2.0. My IP35 Pro is stuck around 14MB/s with 1394 (Initio chipset with 12 BIOS). Same external HDD hits 31MB/s with USB 2.0.

Get a quality 1394 card if you're serious about video/photo. Even with the extra card, IP35-E is still much cheaper than IP35 Pro.

LOL. If I didn't know any better, I would've thought I was being pitched by a rep for Abit.

I just went by the newegg site which said IP35-E has 8 total USB and 4 sata. In contrast, the ds4 had 12 total USB and 8 sata. Never seen the boards in person so I'm only going by the sales info...

Nothing professional about my video/photo work. Just home videos. Also liked the Ds4 for its coax in/out for potential transition to a media PC later on in its life.

 

[SerpentRoyal]

Why check NewEgg when you can download the manual from the web? Other IP35-E owners can also confirm four rear USB ports and four on-board USB headers each capable of supporting two USB ports. Can we take 4 x 2, then add another 4 to make 12?

There's nothing wrong with paying more $ just because you like the name or look. Those who own IP35-E want high-performance with the least amount of $.

 

[CRXican]

bah, now I'm considering the IP35-E because it's so cheap! I really don't need firewire lol

great thread

 

[Samsonid]

A couple of other things that weighed on my decision:

- The Abit does have solid capacitors, but Gigabyte was the first manufacturer to bring them to market (I think in 2006 with the GA-965P-DQ6 @ Computex 2006). To me this is an indication of *initiative* an active pursuit for quality (they did not just follow a trend, but decided to lead the pack).

However, I do have high respects for Abit, because the were the first and only manufacturer to admit problems during the capacitor plague (a sign of honesty and moral integrity) and they were willing to risk class action suits because of such admission. Also, as some people already mentioned Abit has a very active official forum; a sign of sensitivity to providing methods of customer support. Their PDF manual is more well written than the Gigabyte one (at least to me) and I learned a few things from it; for example I was almost going to buy a 24-to-20 pin PSU connector, but with the images on the Abit manual I learned at a glance that a 20pin will connect without the need for adapters (it is little details like this here and there, as well as details on their layout design for user comfort such as LEDs, reset buttons, POST debug display etc, showing that they care for user friendliness).

Gigabyte is not too far behind on user friendliness though ... and I do like their website design a little more.
I have found over the years that I do visit the motherboard online site and when I do it is important. (for example I came to hate ASUS for how many times their servers crawl to a minimum and I decided not to go with ASUS again just on this alone). When looking for new drivers or BIOS, a responsive, easy to navigate, well laid out website with a decent database setup helps.

Also Gigabyte has the @BIOS utility to upgrade the chip directly from within windows. Hands free, no floppies.

 

[SerpentRoyal]

You are aware that 100% solid caps is marketing, right? The high-end Intel boards still use a mix of solid and electrolytic caps. The "leaky" cap issue does not affect tier one Japanese cap mfrs (Nippon Chemi-con, Matsushita/Panasonic, Rubycon, etc). Quality electrolytic caps run at least 5-7 years. The main advantage of solid cap is improved clearance around the CPU area to support large CPU cooler.

 

[Heidfirst]

Originally posted by: Samsonid


- The Abit does have solid capacitors, but Gigabyte was the first manufacturer to bring them to market (I think in 2006 with the GA-965P-DQ6 @ Computex 2006). To me this is an indication of *initiative* (they did not just follow a trend, but decided to lead the pack).

actually I think that it may have even been before that but abit certainly had solid caps in 2006 too & I suspect someone like DFI may have been even earlier.

Also Gigabyte has the @BIOS utility to upgrade the chip directly from within windows. Hands free, no floppies.

so does abit & Asus & MSI ...
& yet if you check you'll find more failed flashes using the Windows flash utilities.
In the same vain 1 thing in abit's favour is that they still use socketed BIOS chips which are easily replaced in the event of a bad flash.
Yes, no doubt Asus & Gigabyte will say that with their recovery utilities that it shouldn't happen but in the real world it does still happen & that means RMAing a whole board whereas on the abit you swap a chip.

 

[Samsonid]

Originally posted by: SerpentRoyal
You are aware that 100% solid caps is marketing, right? The high-end Intel boards still use a mix of solid and electrolytic caps. The "leaky" cap issue does not affect tier one Japanese cap mfrs (Nippon Chemi-con, Matsushita/Panasonic, Rubycon, etc). Quality electrolytic caps run at least 5-7 years. The main advantage of solid cap is improved clearance around the CPU area to support large CPU cooler.

Well, I came off with an experience of bad capacitors and my board was never overclocked. It does happen.
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...id=31&threadid=2095052

I was not going to go through leaky caps again and was ready to go with server boards (such as supermicro, tyan, etc). I have seen reports that even server boards were affected by the electrolytic capacitor problem. It does not happen to all, and it doesn't happen often, but it is not obscure either ... and many PC and workstations may have stuff leaking right *now* ... it is just not many people actually care to open their PCs and investigate inside.

 

[Samsonid]

Originally posted by: Heidfirst
actually I think that it may have even been before that but abit certainly had solid caps in 2006 too & I suspect someone like DFI may have been even earlier.

You would have to provide a link for that though.

 

[SerpentRoyal]

Nippon Chemi-con (Y), Matsushita/Panasonic (T), and Rubycon (K) do not use an (X) break-away stamp at the top of the cap. Do you have a picture of these defective caps?