Hey, im in the market for a new pc and it will be for gaming/performace use. Which P35 motherboard should i go for i have norrowed it down pretty much to Asus, Gigabyte, MSI. I like the P5K3 on board features and its result in RAM, however i know gigabyte worked hard to make its board more compatible with products and the MSI has great on board sound and overclock abillity (which i so far havent done but may in the future).

which board should i choose -

Asus PK53 Deluxe/Wi-Fi **more media ** ???
MSI P35 Diamond **which im finding it hard to purchase**
Gigabyte DQ6 **pricey**
Gigabyte DS3R **weakest link**

all of them have there cons and pros and are all close to each other in peformance. if anyone knows significant info please list and vote. thanks

it'll cost you an arm & a leg for DDR3 dor the P5K3 & at this stage not really show anything for it.
You might also want to consider abit's offerings as their AB9 QuadGT was a strong contender for best 965 mobo & as imo P35 looks to be just a slightly improved 965.

Just get the P5K Deluxe. DDR3 is a waste of money, and will be for at least another year. DDR2 is dirt cheap right now, and it performs just as well as currently available DDR3. That said, the P5K Dlx seems to be the most robust overclocker of the boards currently available.

Really the only change in the boards from a 965 is the Voltage for Penryn and some with DDR3 Support.

That's not completely true. There are other refinements. The new ICH9 southbridge is considerably better than the ICH8 on the 965. The DDR2 memory controller has also been tweaked and gives roughly a 5% performance boost in memory intensive apps. It's not a revolutionary change from the 965, but the improvements are nice, considering that they could have just released a 965 with support for penryn.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipse [...] i=2993&p=4

There's a fairly in-depth look at the refinements Intel made with P35.

Yeah, just got some more info. Sorry for that last post I made.

Anyways, it's looking now like Penryn/Wolfdale won't need a new VRM. It's really in Intels hands, but I hope they make them compatible with the 965 boards since they're proven boards.

Honestly, I think we should all wait a little bit until the 45nm CPUs actually come out to decide on which motherboard is the best. Who knows, all 3 motherboards could flop once you install a 45nm CPU. I think we should all just wait a little bit and see if the motherboards mature and are fully ready to get the P35s.

Well, waiting is always an option, but the P35 is a surprisingly stable and mature chipset. Intel obviously learned its lesson from P965, which was rushed to market with C2D and suffered from a lot of bios and driver immaturity in its first months. As things stand, I highly recommend the P35 to all my customers in lieu of the P965, unless they're going the value road. It has already been confirmed that the Penryn class processors will not function on the 965 chipset. The only chipset I would personally consider waiting for is the X38, which looks like it will be the reigning performance champ.

I bought the P5K Deluxe last week and installed with not hitches except the BSOD i got in Vista 64-bit. Anyways it was resolved because the driver that was causing it was the intel RAID monitor. I just didn't install that driver and let Vista do an automatic update. Haven't had a BSOD since. Its been 3-4 days. I would recommend the board, I havent tried the others, but this one is good from my experience. Now, I am not much of an overclocker, but I bought this board with the intention to overclock sometime in the future when I feel like it. I wanted that option. I don't believe in playing the waiting game, because you can end up waiting around forever. If its not a new piece of hardware that is coming out, then there is a price cut coming out...there is always something, thats how marketing works. I waited for the recent price cut and ordered all the pieces I needed for a new pc. I didn't care to wait another month or two for the next MB/chip/price cut/RAM. Ok, I will get off my soapbox...lol.
So far so good, p5k all the way. I did notice that my mb temp is at 56C, is that normal? I checked googled the prob and there are people that have noticed a 10 degree increase going from XP to Vista on the same MB.