Introduction

It goes without saying that past Intel releases have been secretive up until the NDA dates have come, in fact some products do not even get mentioned to media until less than 24 hours before launch. However, with the P35 chipset (Bearlake) this has not been the case. While the NDA expires today, we have already done preliminary tests on a beta board (from which company we are not able to tell you due to reprisals from Intel). And last week we tested a version of the board from MSI, the P35 Platinum. In fact these boards have been available in Taiwan for over a week now.

P35 is set to replace the P965 chipset with support for DDR-2 and DDR-3 memory depending on what the motherboard manufacturer decides to put out. Not only this, FSB speed is upped to 1333MHz in order to support upcoming Intel CPUs, and it is designed to be paired up with the ninth generation ICH.

Gigabyte has jumped on the P35 bandwagon already with some of its new boards being available in Taiwan for over a week, and now fully available in Australia; Gigabyte has quite a few models planned.

Today's test board from Gigabyte is the P35-DQ6 that is designed around the Dual Quad architecture that made the P965-DQ6 such a performer. Does the P35-DQ6 have what it takes to follow in those footsteps? Let us find out.