I am having problems with my GA-EP35-DS3L MB and noticed that the GA-P35-DS3L MB is having about the same problems also. From Dos, using Ghost 2003 I cannot detect my external USB HD, on my other computer with a GA-K8NSC-939 MB I can. Also the burning and writing speed while in Ghost to my DVD is about half the speed it is on my older computer. Using a Windows 95, 98 or ME boot disk, it will not detect my CD/DVD drives. My new computer has a SATA HD and a IDE CD/DVD drive.I have been in contact with Gigabyte but so far its like they do not want to acknowledge the problem but have not given up. I finally found software, a disk clone for partitions that was free so they could down load it and see the problem. It could not detect my external USB drive on the new MB but does on my older MB. Easeus Disk Copy 2.0 is supposed to support, SATA1, SATA2, ACSI, Fire wire (IEEE1394) and USB. So it is not an old piece of software.
http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/index.htm This is web site for disk copy. There is also a help menu in the program and at the web site if you want to download and try. Maybe all the newer Gigabyte boards are like this? Bios detects everything, it sees the USB HD, the software sees nothing but on older boards the software works. Is anyone else having this problems with these boards? If you found an answer I would like to know and if not I would like for you to write to Gigabyte, I think a few more inquires about this and they will find an answer. You need your model, serial, bios load and board rev and tell them your problem.
Contact them at: http://tw.giga-byte.com/Support/ServiceCenter.aspx
Joe

I've also had problems with that motherboard. Mouse would stutter and DPCLatencies were unacceptable (see DPC Latency Checker on the web).

I've partially solved the problem by using a special bios they sent me. I think its version F3g. It's not on the website though.

It's a partial solution since there can still be some mouse stutter under specific conditions.

I am a heavy user : 4 hard drives, all 8 sata ports used for various devices. USB usage and PCIExpress full bandwith usage...

I think they design the boards for light usage and then boats cool features to attract buyers even though the card don't really support full load.

I'm thinking of offloading raid processing to an external hardware-based processor. That would enable me to free 1.2 Gb/s of bandwith by turning off the Gigaraid controller.

If you want to try the F3g bios, send me a message.