- The Package

The Gigabyte P35-DQ6 costs around €175~200, as found at several online stores. The retail package is full of logos to inform you about the motherboard features:

Opening the big retail box, we find the motherboard in a protective plastic shell that keeps the motherboard in place and well protected.

All included cables are shown below:

The manuals and CDs included:

Below is a list of what's included in the retail package:

• 4x Serial ATA cables
• 4x eSata (on two rear brackets)
• 4x USB (on two rear brackets).
• I/O Shield
• User's manual
• 2x Molex-Sata power cables
• 1x Floppy & 1x IDE ribbons
• 1x CD-ROM with drivers
• Multi-Language quick install guide
• Printed English manual

The board is well designed and all parts can be identified easily:

Let's zoom in on the CPU area.

The Gigabyte P35-DQ6 has the biggest copper heatpipes we have seen on a motherboard. Gigabyte advertises the product as the "coolest" board, and those heatpipes will keep their promise. Users will notice the restricted amount of around the CPU. We tried the AC Freezer 7 CPU cooler which, as with the other boards so far had to be rotated in order to fit. Before purchasing a cooler, check the compatibility list!

On the back, we find more copper heatsinking! This provides additional cooling with the standard set-up, but with a 3rd party cooler, it may need to be removed.

The motherboard has four banks for DDR2 memory modules with up to 8GB of total DRAM.

Moving to the southbridge area on the board, we can see the passive heatsink and the 8x SATA2 connections, well organized and easily accessible.

The motherboard supports CrossFire Technology. There are 2x PCI-E x16 slots. In case you use both channels, the blue channel works at x16 mode, while the orange @ x4. There is enough space between the two PCI-E slots, so no problem here for extra big VGA cards:

There are several extra connections for the rear panel. The rear I/O panel includes:

• 1 x PS/2 Keyboard
• 1x PS2/2 Mouse
• 1 x S/PDIF Out (Coaxial + Optical)
• 1 x IEEE1394a
• 1 x RJ45 port
• 4 x USB 2.0/1.1
• 1 x LPT Port
• 1x COM port
• 8-channel Audio I/O

Unlike with the two previous Asus boards, the Gigabyte P35-DQ6 has both keyboard and mouse PS2 ports, only one Gigabit Lan and no external SATA ports.