A dedicated 2GB/s I/O bus connects the Intel P35 Express Express Northbridge and ICH9R Southbridge together, which might be a little tight if you have many high bandwidth devices installed but should be just fine for the average user. You will recall this figure has not increased since the P965 Express chipset.

The Gigabyte GA-P35-DQ6 motherboard comes installed with the ICH9R Southbridge which includes a ton of goodies.

There are six 3GB/s Serial ATA II channels (which support RAID modes 0, 1, 5 and 10) as well a 7.1 channel Intel Azalia high definition audio, twelve U480MB/s SB 2.0 ports in total (split between headers and the I/O slot), six PCI Express x1 lanes at 500MB/s bandwidth each, and an integrated Intel Gigabit MAC that runs through the PCI Express bus specific to this chipset.

Noticeably lacking from the chipset itself is parallel IDE support. In this case, Gigabyte resorts to a stand alone IDE controller to provide IDE support on the GA-P35-DQ6 motherboard. A block chart of the Intel P35 Express Express chipset's major features is illustrated below.

Intel Turbo Memory is the only truly new feature of the ICH9 Southbridge. Essentially it allows you to connect a special Flash cache memory card to the PCI Express bus. It is supposed to improve application and data loading of the computer by off-loading recurring HDD tasks to the Flash memory card. At the moment Intel’s Turbo Memory technology is aimed at the mobile market where hard drives tend to be slower.

Intel G35 Express Chipset in Brief

Even though the Gigabyte GA-P35-DQ6 motherboard is equipped with the Intel P35 Express, we're going to talk briefly about Intel's new onboard graphics core logic solution - called the Intel G35 Express chipset. The G35 contains integrated video in the form of Intel's upcoming X3500 Graphics Media Accelerator. The X3500 GMA is DirectX 10 compliant, so it supports goodies like Shader Model 4.0 and is Windows Vista Aeroglass compliant. Of course considering how radical the DirectX 10 standard is, you'll be happy to hear that the X3500 GMA is also backwards compatible with DirectX 9.0C.

The Intel X3500 GMA also supports Blu-Ray and HD-DVD playback, as well as MPEG2 and VC1 acceleration. The chipset integrates HDCP and supports HDMI, DVI and analog video outputs. It is up to the manufacturers' discretion to implement the video output jacks. The Intel G35 is scheduled to be released sometime in the Q3 of 2007 and is designed to compete directly against AMD's 690G and nVIDIA's GeForce 7000 series integrated platforms.

Now let's take a quick look at the highlights of Gigabyte's GA-P35DQ6 motherboard.