The Unofficial Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R P35 Board Thread

[TezzRexx]

Originally posted by: TezzRexx
Hi, i'm having a problem with this board and was wondering if any of you can help.

I've been trying to use my old optical DVD drives and HDD through the IDE port on the motherboard so I can install windows and then transfer over all my old documents etc from the old HDD.

However the motherboard fails to reconise all of them (however, it did see one of the hard drives once, but then I tried a different cable and it didnt work, then tried the original cable that I just used and then that wouldn't work.)

I've tried resetting the BIOS, using different jumpers on the drives (fairly sure i dont need them if im only connecting one at a time though.), different IDE and power cables from the PSU and nothing seems to work.

Any suggestions?

My Specs are;
2GB (2x1GB) CorsairTwinX XMS2, DDR2
1 x EVGA 8800GTS SuperClocked 320MB DDR3 DVI PCI-E Graphics Card
1 x Corsair VX450WUK 450W PSU
400 Gb Western Digital WD4000AAKS Caviar SE16, SATA300, 7200 rpm, 16MB Cache, 9 ms

Anyone got a solution?

 

[shimurlz]

Hi, i finally got my new system up and running based on this mobo (p35c-ds3r). I'd like to know if u use the speedfan software. And if u use this software with this mobo i'd like to know if u know what Temp1, Temp2, ..., Ambient refereces for, like temp1 means cpu temp, and so on ...

 

[Shlonglor]

I can't update the BIOS for my GA-P35-DS3 (rev 1), no matter what I do.
I have the f4 BIOS currently. BIOS protection is set to auto (not enabled). In Q-Flash, it reads the f6 (or f5 which I also tried) BIOS but says it's bad before updating. In windows, using the bat file, I hit go, a dox box opens for a milisec and closes with nothing except an .err file that's automatically created.
What am I doing wrong?

P.S. Is there an OC guide for the board anywhere? I'm at 450 mhz currently (with a E6300) and I want to go higher...

 

[darkenedsoul]

Hi, I just recently put together this motherboard (P35C-DS3R) with RAID 0, XFX 640M extreme 8800GTS, 4Gb Corsair Dominator PC2-8500 1066 memory and E6850 C2D and Zalman 9700 NT cooler. Temps using Intel's TAT tool at load showed my CPU's running at about 31/32 for temps ;-) which my buddy was very surprised at. With no load they are high teens, like 18/19 per core. I assume this is really good. I've never done overclocking and wanted to crank this puppy up a bit faster. It's quick enough as it is now though but would like to get a bit more out of it but not burn the system out. Running XP Pro SP2 and may load Vista 64 at a later date (Ultimate most likely) and possibly Ubuntu via its Wubi installer. I have to do a bit of reading to see how it behaves with Vista installed onto the boot blocks. It runs very well with XP though.

I want to overclock this puppy. I used the Gigabyte tool to run up the FSB and it locked up the system at around 3.5Ghz with stock settings in BIOS. I rebooted and brought up the tool and set it to around 3.4Ghz and saved but it didn't take in BIOS. So questions are a) did I miss something about this tool, i.e. does it actually save to BIOS and b) what do I need to do to overclock this up aways? I don't want to go crazy. I know of the CTRL-F1 to get to teh MIT page and have been there poking around a bit. I want just to get faster and stable. 3.4-3.6Ghz range possibly that won't burn out CPU/memory from heat, etc... I do like the board, it's rev. 1.1 also and I updated to rev. 1.x F4 after firing system up. Currently have 2 500Gb Raid 0 maxtors and 3rd as non-raid disk. Almost got a 4th to do 2 raid sets but I think ~1.5Tb is enough storage ;-)

Thanks in advance!

 

[Conjugal Visit]

@darkenedsoul - hello and welcome. You ought to read this thread and perhaps post there; there is a lot of practical information regarding your board, and overclocking in general. For instance, you're going to hear "don't use Easytune" and don't use MIT." Read the thread, have your motherboard manual in hand, and be sensible and methodical. The BIOS is very easy to work thru.

http://forums.anandtech.com/me...=2094667&enterthread=y

That is a sweet rig, and an immediate and reasonable O/C is going to be easy. You should have no trouble finding reasonable O/Cs given your ram and this processor.

 

[darkenedsoul]

Originally posted by: Conjugal Visit

@darkenedsoul - hello and welcome. You ought to read this thread and perhaps post there; there is a lot of practical information regarding your board, and overclocking in general. For instance, you're going to hear "don't use Easytune" and don't use MIT." Read the thread, have your motherboard manual in hand, and be sensible and methodical. The BIOS is very easy to work thru.

http://forums.anandtech.com/me...=2094667&enterthread=y

That is a sweet rig, and an immediate and reasonable O/C is going to be easy. You should have no trouble finding reasonable O/Cs given your ram and this processor.

Hi,

Thanks for the welcome. I'll go peruse the thread now and see what I can garner from it. I don't want to go nuts on the board, I'd just like to see how it goes and kick it up a bit. And even at stock speed it's noticably faster than either of my Athlon XP system (3200/3K boxes) ;-)

Mike

 

[barbaroja9]

Well, I got one of these boards, and now I am unhappy cause my crucial ballistix 2x1gb 8500 is dead. Rare to see these modules die, they did after 3 months of use, not overclocked. I ordered corsair 4gb 6400 dhx. I hope these last. My crucials were very hot to the touch. These corsairs have heatspreaders. Hard to fit with my ninja heatspreader, I hope they work fine in dual channel in the red slots, since the yellow is too close to the CPU.

And yes, my chipset heatspreader was not in place when I first opened the MB box. I had to reinstall it.

I hope is not the board killing memory as I read somewhere...

 

[mrfatboy]

Originally posted by: barbaroja9
Well, I got one of these boards, and now I am unhappy cause my crucial ballistix 2x1gb 8500 is dead. Rare to see these modules die, they did after 3 months of use, not overclocked. I ordered corsair 4gb 6400 dhx. I hope these last. My crucials were very hot to the touch. These corsairs have heatspreaders. Hard to fit with my ninja heatspreader, I hope they work fine in dual channel in the red slots, since the yellow is too close to the CPU.

And yes, my chipset heatspreader was not in place when I first opened the MB box. I had to reinstall it.

I hope is not the board killing memory as I read somewhere...

What did you have your ddr2/ddr3 Overvoltage setting in the BIOS set to?

 

[lambdaboyx]

I am having a problem with my memory in the rig described my profile.

I used to have just 2 sticks of the 2 X 1GB Crucial Ballistixs DDR2 800 4-4-4-12, but i ran it at 850. No problems running that for about 3 months, and i have run Orthos many times indefinitely with no errors.

Last night I installed 2 more gigs of the 2 X 1GB Crucial Ballistixs DDR2 800 4-4-4-12 which I bought from Buy.com for a steal. I thought running 4 gigs total would be great, but I got an error from Orthos after stressing for only 8 hours.

I thought I might need to up the voltage because of the 2 additional RAM sticks, so I changed the overvoltage from +.3 to +.4. That gave me an error in Orthos after about an hour.

Now I changed the voltage to motherboard auto, and it ran fine for 40 min. I didn't test longer because i had to head out to work.

Any suggestions on how to get my system to run stable with 4 sticks of the Ballistix?

 

[mrfatboy]

It sounds like you are 1 day ahead of me My extra 2 gigs of Ballistix comes today from Buy.com $45 was a great deal

I have not decided yet if I am going to put the extra 2 gigs in my system yet. I have a 3.6 OC and have a feeling that I would not get that anymore with 4 gigs.

First of all, I would recommend setting your ddr2 voltage to +.3 to get (2.24v). You are overvolting with +.4. It's a P35C problem.

I think your next step would be to either:

1) losen timings to 5-5-5-15
2) increase (g)mgh
3) increase fsb

Try #1 first and let us know how that works.

 

[lambdaboyx]

Yeah I set my voltage to Auto. I think the mobo is automatically setting it to the equivalent to +.3 cuz in speedfan I am showing ram voltage of around 2.24 or so.

I was thinking about loosening up the timings to 5-5-5-12. Do you know how much performance will I lose if I do this but keep the same FSB?

Reason why loosening timings is appealing is so then I can push the FSB higher, but that would overclock the CPU as well, which I am unsure about since it is running great right now at 3.4.

I didn't know adding 2 extra sticks of RAM was going to cause me any problems. I figured if it was the same brand and everything that everything would work same together as before.

 

[mrfatboy]

Originally posted by: lambdaboyx
Yeah I set my voltage to Auto. I think the mobo is automatically setting it to the equivalent to +.3 cuz in speedfan I am showing ram voltage of around 2.24 or so.

I was thinking about loosening up the timings to 5-5-5-12. Do you know how much performance will I lose if I do this but keep the same FSB?

Reason why loosening timings is appealing is so then I can push the FSB higher, but that would overclock the CPU as well, which I am unsure about since it is running great right now at 3.4.

I didn't know adding 2 extra sticks of RAM was going to cause me any problems. I figured if it was the same brand and everything that everything would work same together as before.

It's always harder to an OC with 4 sticks instead of 2. It's just the way it is. if it becomes stable with 5-5-5-15 then great. I don't think you will notice a difference. I was planning on having to do the same thing.

Take your mem voltage off auto and set to +.3 just to make sure.

 

[lambdaboyx]

OK I didn't know 4 was harder than 2. Makes sense though. Is it because of heat due to the close proximity of the extra chips that is causing the problems? Or is it a motherboard issue?

I think I'll give loosening to 5-5-5-15 a go. Maybe then I can even up the FSB from 425 to 450 with my 4 ram sticks and get my cpu to 3.6.

BTW what's your cpu voltage for running at 3.6?

 

[mrfatboy]

Originally posted by: lambdaboyx
OK I didn't know 4 was harder than 2. Makes sense though. Is it because of heat due to the close proximity of the extra chips that is causing the problems? Or is it a motherboard issue?

I think I'll give loosening to 5-5-5-15 a go. Maybe then I can even up the FSB from 425 to 450 with my 4 ram sticks and get my cpu to 3.6.

BTW what's your cpu voltage for running at 3.6?

See my sig and OP for my specs. Having 4 sticks requires more power, more things can go wrong, more, more, etc. You get idea. I will let someone that really knows comment

 

[barbaroja9]

Originally posted by: mrfatboy
What did you have your ddr2/ddr3 Overvoltage setting in the BIOS set to?

I had them at +0.4 volts. Wich is 2.2 volts, thats what crucial recommends for that RAM. But very funny, I have found better results with 2 volts. More stability. I still have one module working here, the other one wont POST. I have it underclocked to 800Mhz.

My board revision is 1.1 I hope its not killing RAM!!!

 

[mrfatboy]

I'll say it again so everybody can hear


WARNING!
There is evidence that this board overvolts the ram (DDR2/DDR3 Overvoltage Control). Please use caution when changing this bios option. Testing on multiple boards seems to suggest that the actual memory voltages are :

Delta---------Actual voltage
+.0v----------2.00v
+.1v----------2.00v
+.2v----------2.13v
+.3v----------2.24v
+.4v----------2.37v




It we can save just 1 ram sticks life it will be worth it!

 

[barbaroja9]

Oh my god! So lots of us had our memories overvoltaged...

Maybe thats why our memories are dying?

 

[mrfatboy]

Originally posted by: barbaroja9
Oh my god! So lots of us had our memories overvoltaged...

Maybe thats why our memories are dying?

Ding! Ding! Ding!. Now you got it! Well, that's my theory anyway

 

[barbaroja9]

Well it makes sense, since when I set the memory voltages lower that they "should be", it worked perfect. What a stupid issue...

 

[lambdaboyx]

Hey mrfatboy

how are you running your ram at 800 with timings at 4-4-4-12 but at the same time overclocking your CPU to 3.6?

Also what's (g)MCH?

 

[mrfatboy]

Originally posted by: lambdaboyx
Hey mrfatboy

how are you running your ram at 800 with timings at 4-4-4-12 but at the same time overclocking your CPU to 3.6?

Also what's (g)MCH?

I have ddr2 800 that is running 1:1 @ 450 (3.6) which means is running @ 900. Sort of confusing.

(g)mch is the northbridge chipset.

 

[4836348435]

I found what my problem was. When I disable SPD, it reverts back to 1.8V. I had to manually increase the voltage. After doing so, I was able to increase my FSB slightly from 389 MHz to 397 MHz. So I finally ended up with 9x 397, 5:4, and 4-4-4-12.

Another funny thing... I just realized after writing this is that I've been posting to the GA-P35C-DS3R thread, but I have a GA-P35-DS3R. I'm not quite sure what the difference is, but I guess I'm posting in the wrong thread.

 

[barbaroja9]

Mrfatboy, I checked my crucial temps. I do not have a infrared sensor or fluke probe. I had to figure it out. How? I checked my grahics card temp in the windows sensor. It reads 60ºC idle. it scares me a little, but the threshold of temp is 125ºC according to the same config screen. My memory is slightly hotter than the graphics card, so I guess its 6x degrees. Its pretty hot for a memory, maybe thats the reason why one of my modules died. Its crucial ballistix 8500. Somewhere I read that this board does not like the F4 bios version and this memory. I am waiting for 4gb of corsair with heatspreaders.
My case is well cooled, CPU has a ninja with a nexus 120mm fan, in front of the case is a schythe 12mm fan, rear has a nexus fan, and my PSU is an enermax with a fan pointing the ninja, wich extracts more air to the back of the case. No side fans.

I will test the memory today in a friends board and see if it gets hot. If not, my board is faulty. If it is, then I dont like crucial.

Best

 

[Rob1556]

Hi

Just about to buy this board and the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro

I notice that a couple on here have these two, any problems with this hs hitting the nb hs ?

If so is how did you get round this ?

Cheers

 

[darkenedsoul]

I've posted in the CPU and overclocking thread. I've got the same mobo rev. 1.1, F4 BIOS for rev. 1.x boards, 4Gb Corsair Dominator 1066 running at 4-4-4-12 at ~820 1:1 ratio and FSB at 411x9 for 3.7Ghz for 12hr Orthos CPU/Blend run. Stable, no errors. I am going to try upping FSB to get me to 3.8Ghz and see if she's stable. I may stop at that point or try for 3.9Ghz to get a 30% increase. I'm happy where it's at but will try a bit more.

I've got a Zalman 9700 NT on the CPU as that was recommended by a lot of folks + reviews at Newegg.com on it. Thermaltake Armor case (120mm intake/exhaust fans no side fan) and Thermaltake Tough Power 700W PSU (should all be in my sig).

For the person asking what the P35C/P35 difference is the P35C can do either DDR2 or DDR3 memory if I remember right. the DS3R means it does RAID.