Discovering the difference between motherboards of the same product line can be difficult, but decoding the motherboard naming scheme can be even more painful. However, for those who are scrupulous about motherboard functions and expandibilities, knowing what abbreviation represent what function can be extremely useful when hunting down the perfect central nervous system for your PC.

Here are some guides to assist you.

Gigabyte Motherboard

Information from Wikipedia:

Gigabyte use a special system for naming their motherboards. They might be called GA-P35-DS3R. The first segment, GA, simply denotes that it's manufactured by Gigabyte. The second segment indicates what chipset it is using, in this case Intels P35. The third part is the most interesting one, it can tell you what features it has. This is also the most cryptic segment, mostly containing a number of abbrevations. Available 2nd segment abbrevations:

• E - Energy saving features
• T - Only DDR3 support
• C - Both DDR2 and DDR3 support

Available 3rd segment abbrevations:

• D (durability) - Indicates that the motherboard uses only solid state capacitors
• S2 (Smart, Safe) - Various features such as Q-Flash BIOS etc
• S3 (Smart, Speed, Safe) - Same as above, but includes overclocking features
• S4 (Silent Pipe, Smart, Speed, Safe) - Same as above, but uses heat pipe cooling
• S5 (CrossFire, Silent Pipe, Smart, Speed, Safe) - Same as above, but with CrossFire support
• Q6 (Quad Bios, Quad Cooling, Quad E-SATA2, Quad Triple Phase, Quad-Core Optimized, Quad DDR2 Slots) - Indicates quad-core optimiziation

Available 4th segment abbrevations:

• R - 2 extra SATA2 ports and possibly RAID (ie P35-DS3R)
• G - Solid capacitors for the CPU Volt Regulator Module
• H - HDMI port
• L - Probably "Lite". Could contain less SATA2 (ie P35-DS3L)