I'm trying to understand the salient differences between the following Gigabyte P35 mobo's:

DS3L
DS3R
DS3P
DS4

I also noticed they have P35, EP35 and EP35C motherboards - again I'm having trouble understanding.

I am looking for value - probably will never run RAID with this mobo, and I might want to overclock one day, but I have never done it and so certain fine tuning features would be nice, but I don't know if I'd ever use them. Can you help me understand these models better? Thanks!

The 'D' stands for Durable (only solid-state capacitors), the 'S3' stands for Smart, Speed and Safe. The DS3L has 4 SATA ports and no RAID capability. The DS3R adds an additional 2 SATA ports with RAID capability. The difference between a P35 and EP35 is Gigabytes Dynamic Energy Saver which shuts down power phases based on power requirements at the time to save power when it's not needed. The EP35C board has both DDR2 and DDR3 slots.

I would say the DS3L would probably suit you well since you don't need RAID and they overclock pretty well according to the reviews.

I'm sure someone will explain it better, but this might help.

^yeah, u covered mostly everything. but u forgot one thing.

P35C, P35. the C means it has four ram slots for DDR2, and another two ram slots for DDR3. while the P35 will have 4 ram slots all DDR2

edit..fixed a mistake

edit^2. u actually covered everything. but i missed it.

Thank you very much for the reply.

So what is the 4th "S" in the S4?

Also, are there any stability / peformance concerns, if I get an Energy Saver model? I'm somewhat paranoid about games and other applications reacting poorly if the mobo tries to do too much thinking (have been burned by the network controller on my current nForce board).

.

eP35 - e-nergy saver
P35c - c-ombo ddr2 +ddr3 memory
P35R- r-aid,
P35L - L-ight (ie same as R but without the raid, 2sata ports and a tad lower integrated audio- 888 vs 889 on the R)
DS3P - P- ipe - uses pipe for pasive cooling.
DS4 - D - for D- urable
- S4- Smart, Speed, Safe & Silent (4xS) - silent here means that it uses silent pipe- ie no active cooling (fan). this doesn't mean that other models are not silent, but that they dont have the silent pipe.

DS4 is the most advanced one in the (listed) bunch. It has the most (useless crap) addons compared to the rest, and costs the most. Still, if you have the money it does offer most of all (listed).

So is DS3P and DS4 essentially the same?