The TP35D2-A7 may be among the least expensive P35-based motherboards on the market, but it's short a few of the amenities most enthusiasts expect. If you're looking for a little more than what the D2 provides, Biostar has the TP35D3-A7 Deluxe. D3, in this case, denotes the board's support for DDR3 rather than DDR2 memory.
Supporting DDR3 over DDR2 for what is essentially a mid-range enthusiast board is a curious choice given current memory prices. Biostar's selection of colors is also a little odd; the D3 is a black board with orange and white trim that has an almost retro '70s feel. I actually quite like the look. All it needs is a moustache and some shag carpet.
Color palette aside, Biostar has made some good choices with the D3's layout. Power plugs are located along the edges of the board where they won't interfere with airflow around the CPU socket. There's also an eight-pin plug for the auxiliary 12V line rather than the four-pin plug you get with the D2.
From above, you'll notice that the D3 is peppered with "solid state" capacitors rather than traditional electrolytic caps. Numerous motherboard manufacturers have switched to using solid-state caps exclusively on their high-end boards, and Biostar is the latest to jump on that bandwagon. These capacitors are supposed to have a longer lifespan than traditional designs, and that should provide extra peace of mind to anyone who has lost a board to bursting caps.
The shorter solid-state caps leave plenty of clearance around the CPU socket, but a ring of heatpipe coolers could complicate clearance for extremely wide CPU heatsinks.
Despite its fancy heatpipe chipset cooling, the D3 has the exact same P35 Express north bridge chip as the D2. The chip's memory controller supports both DDR2 and DDR3 memory, so board makers can decide for themselves which memory type to throw their weight behind.
The D3 differs from the D2 on the south bridge front, though, and not just because of the heatpipe cooler. Biostar has equipped the D3 with Intel's ICH9R south bridge, so you get a full six Serial ATA ports in addition to support for RAID and AHCI. The ICH9R still lacks old-school ATA support, though, so Biostar again employs an auxiliary storage controller from Marvell to give the D3 an IDE port. That Marvell chip also feeds the board's external Serial ATA ports, which we'll cover in a moment.
As we saw with the D2, Biostar throws in onboard power and reset buttons for the D3. This time, they're outfitted with chunky, colored buttons so you don't have to squint at tiny labels silk-screened onto the board to figure out which is which.
Swinging around to the slot stack, we find another similarity between the D2 and the D3: a single PCI Express x16 slot. On a $90 motherboard like the D2, the lack of multi-GPU graphics support isn't an issue. However, the D3 costs upwards of $160, and that puts it in competition with boards that provide CrossFire support via a pair of PCIe x16 slots. The D3 has only two standard PCI slots, as well. The board does offer up three PCIe x1 slots, but one of those will be blocked if you're running a double-wide graphics card.
That double-wide graphics card can also block access to two of the board's Serial ATA ports—a common problem on boards with dual x16 slots, but one that Biostar should have been able to avoid here.
Overall, then, the D3 actually has fewer useful expansion slots than the D2. And with the right—or I suppose wrong—graphics card, it has the same number of accessible Serial ATA ports, too.
Fortunately, the D3 packs a little extra punch in its port cluster. In addition to six USB ports, you also get a pair of eSATA ports that should come in handy for external hard drives. There are two networking jacks, as well, each powered by its own Marvell Gigabit Ethernet chip. As with the D2, however, you won't find Firewire support anywhere on the D3.
You will find support for digital audio output, but only via an external PCI back plate. Still, this back plate provides both TOS-Link and coaxial outputs, so it's easy to bypass the onboard Realtek codec chip's DACs and feed a pristine binary bitstream to a compatible digital receiver or speakers.
