To shed some light on a confusing situation Gigabyte has sent us one of their P31 motherboards for review. P31 hardware is targeted directly for the budget consumer and accordingly can be found for just under $80 in several flavors from various motherboard makers. Intel is not known for cheaply pricing their venerable chipsets, so P31 is unique in that it is a hybrid of the much acclaimed P35 and old stalwart 975X chipsets. For the technically inclined the P31 chipset is composed of the P35 northbridge MCH chip with the 975X’s ICH7 southbridge chip for an interesting combination of old and new. For reference 965 chipsets used ICH8 and P35 uses the ICH9 series of southbridge chips.

P35 has been a popular, if usually pricey choice until late as it has offered tangible performance benefits over the older 975X and 965P chipsets it has replaced, and today we shall discover if P31 can offer the same performance or even a possible performance improvement at a lower price! While there are more than a few motherboard manufacturers with P31 based offerings, these boards are not very common and more importantly all P31 boards do feature some strings attached which we will cover in detail later in the article.