In the wake of the Core 2 Duo launch, Gigabyte's P965 boards quickly became popular among enthusiasts looking for an affordable overclocking platform for Intel's latest CPU. The GA-P965-DS3 was a particular favorite among forum fanboys whose enthusiasm spawned several revisions that are still widely recommended today. The P965 has since been supplanted by the P35, and Gigabyte has moved to embrace Intel's latest chipset with open arms.

The new GA-P35-DQ6 is one of an almost unbelievable nine Gigabyte boards based on the P35 chipset. However, several of those boards differ only in their memory support, much like the Asus P5K and P5K3. The DDR2-ready GA-P35-DQ6, for example is virtually identical to the GA-P35T-DQ6, which supports DDR3 memory.

In typical Gigabyte fashion, the GA-P35-DQ6 comes on a turquoise board loaded with multicolored slots and ports. This is a look that Gigabyte has worn for years. Though a little garish for some, it's become one of the most distinctive hallmarks of the Gigabyte brand.

The layout starts well, too. Although you can't see it clearly in the picture above, the auxiliary 12V power connector is tucked away in the top left-hand corner of the board where we generally prefer it. This plug placement works well for traditional enclosures that put the power supply above the motherboard, but it's considerably less convenient for "upside-down" cases that mount the PSU below the mobo.

While we're talking about power connectors, note that the four-pin molex connector recommended for use with CrossFire configurations is located in the top right-hand corner of the board, just above the 24-pin primary power connector. This placement should keep power supply cables from criss-crossing the board or interfering with expansion cards.

Narrowing our focus to the CPU socket reveals one of the oddest chipset coolers we've ever seen on a motherboard—or any PC component, for that matter. The cooler almost looks like a collection of buildings in a city of the future, with extra bits jutting out here and there. This is certainly one of the most intricate motherboard coolers we've seen, but I can't help but think it looks cobbled together, as if a Gigabyte engineer revisited the design several times to add more cooling fins.

Regardless of how it looks, the cooler does wall off the CPU socket on three sides. Gigabyte has also buried the CPU fan header in the tightest corner of the cooler, ensuring at least a couple of minutes of frustrated struggling for those of us with stumpy fingers.

There's more to the GA-P35-DQ6's cooling scheme than what you can see up top. Flipping the board reveals copper plates that cover the CPU socket and north and south bridge chips. These plates aren't linked into the DQ6's heatpipe array as they are on the company's latest nForce 680i SLI board, but Gigabyte says they still help to lower CPU temperatures.

Returning topside, we see that Gigabyte has neatly clustered the DQ6's storage ports in the bottom right-hand corner of the board. As long as they're kept in the top PCIe x16 slot, longer double-wide graphics cards won't interfere with any of the storage ports, either. However, a GeForce 7900 GTX plugged into the lower x16 slot will block access to four of the orange SATA ports. You'll be able to get at a couple of them using right-angle SATA cables, but it's at best a tight squeeze.

Running double-wide graphics cards in both x16 slots will cost you PCI and PCIe x1 slots, but that still leaves you with two of the latter and one of the former. The top PCIe x1 slot is a little close to the chipset cooler's, er, superstructure, as well. There's enough clearance for an x1 expansion card, but only just.

With chipset cooling from the future, I didn't expect to see serial and parallel ports appear in the DQ6's port cluster. In fact, this is the only board in the roundup with the old-school ports. And Gigabyte hasn't tipped its cap to the old guard at the expense of more modern conveniences, either. The DQ6 sports coaxial and TOS-Link digital audio outputs, four USB ports with onboard headers for eight more, and one Firewire port with onboard headers for an additional two. The only thing really missing here is external Serial ATA connectivity, to which Gigabyte has a rather unique approach.

Rather than saddling users with a set number of eSATA ports that are unequivocally tied to an auxiliary storage controller, Gigabyte ships the DQ6 with expansion slot cover plates capable of transforming any internal SATA port into an eSATA connection. The board comes with two of these plates and all the necessary cables to power four eSATA ports, and you can run those ports off either the ICH9R south bridge or the auxiliary "GSATA" Serial ATA controller. Flexibility is really what makes this eSATA implementation for me, and if you have no use for eSATA, you can dedicate all eight of the DQ6's SATA ports to internal drives.