Gigabyte GA-P35T-DQ6: DDR3 comes a knocking, again

Memory Performance

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We optimized each BIOS to provide the best performance at similar memory timings while still being able to complete our entire benchmark test suite. We will fully optimize each board based upon its best performance potential in our upcoming chipset shootout. However, for now we are comparing like timings on each board to show differences in the way each manufacturer implements other BIOS enhancements such as ASUS's Transaction Booster or Gigabyte's Turbo Memory enhancement. Despite the cliché names, we generally see an improvement in unbuffered memory and latency results of up to 7% when they are enabled.

Gigabyte's latest F2N BIOS has brought their DDR3 memory performance up to and it is now surpassing ASUS's DDR3 performance. We expect MSI to improve their memory performance greatly in a soon to be released performance BIOS. In the meantime, we notice that DDR3-1066 memory performance is just not worth the price of admission. In fact, we cannot recommend anything less than DDR3-1333 if you are considering a DDR3 board. The performance penalties are just too severe as our original P35 chipset preview article showed. In fact, we have removed DDR3-1066 scores from our results now. Stay away; stay far away. (DDR3-1066 reminds us a bit of DDR2-400, and we expect it to have a similar shelf life.)

We see our Gigabyte P35T-DQ6 offering the best overall memory bandwidth, latency, and Quake 4 scores in our tests. The price for this is a seeming lack of ability for this board to run DDR3 past 1600MHz with our QX6700 in a stable manner. Whether this is the BIOS, our early DDR3 samples, or chipset issues is up for debate at this point. What we do know is our ASUS P5K3 board will run up to DDR3-1800 with the same memory and that Gigabyte is currently working to address our problem.

Rendering Performance

We are using the Cinebench 9.5 benchmark as it tends to heavily stress the CPU and FSB subsystems while performing graphics modeling and rendering. Cinebench 9.5 features two different benchmarks with one test utilizing a single core and the second test showcasing the power of multiple cores in rendering the benchmark image. We utilize the standard multiple core benchmark demo and default settings.


The improved CPU throughput speeds of the P5K3 board results in the top score, putting it 1% ahead of the Gigabyte DDR3 board. We will see this pattern continue in a couple of benchmarks that are CPU limited as the ASUS board has better CPU throughput. The remaining boards are all clustered within 2% of each other, with most of the P35 boards placing ahead of the incumbents. This is one benchmark that clearly benefits from improved front side bus speeds and memory bandwidth.

File Compression Performance

In order to save space on our hard drives and ensure we had another CPU crunching utility, we will be reporting our file compression results with the latest version of WinRAR that fully supports multi-treaded operations and should be of particular interest for those users with dual core or multi-processor systems. Our series of file compression tests utilizes WinRAR 3.62 to compress our test folder that contains 444 files, ten subfolders, and 602MB worth of data. All default settings are utilized in WinRAR along with our hard drive being defragmented before each test.


Our 1333FSB/DDR2-1066 platform provides the top score and actually distances itself from the other boards in this CPU intensive test that heavily relies on memory throughput and latency for improved performance. We see the DDR3 configurations finishing last, as it trail DDR2 right now in terms of latencies. The nature of file compression is such that memory is accessed almost constantly in a very random fashion, so page misses requiring additional time as memory bank swapping is a common occurrence.