Is the Gigabyte P35-DQ6 Being Discontinued?

The Gigabyte P35-DQ6. Gigabyte’s most-popular motherboard in recent history and possibly the best-selling Intel [[INTC]] Core 2 Duo motherboard currently on the market. It overclocks well, it’s well within budget for a performance PC, it has tons of options, and it’s pretty damn stable. Is it also on the verge of a product recall?

In the past two weeks, the GA P35-DQ6 has been – quite literally – disappearing off shelves both online and offline. Popular online computer part retailers like Newegg, ZipZoomFly, TigerDirect, Fry’s, and Amazon — all of whom carried this highly-successful board a month ago — no longer have it in stock.

What’s even weirder (scarier, even) is that some stores like NewEgg and ZipZoomFly would keep some sort of record of out-of-stock items. The page would still be there, a backorder button would be present, and there would be some form of indication or the other that the product, at the very least, even existed at some point of time… but for some odd reason, they don’t.

We even had the DQ6 in a saved wishlist on NewEgg, and it just vanished from the wishlist without a warning or notification – only the 200-dollar less total alerted us to its absence – whereas an nVidia 8800 GTX model that was currently out of stock presented us with a colored warning in bold, red text at the top of the page.

What happened to the DQ6? Is it simply a matter of Gigabyte trying to push its (relatively) lackluster X38-DQ6 product line out when all the enthusiast review sites aren’t seeing a reason to spend the extra hundred greenbacks for the X38 model, especially when the P35 performs equally well and there is no reason to take the DDR3 dive?

Or perhaps something more sinister is afoot – after all, this wouldn’t be the first time a successful product turned out to have major problems that didn’t show up in initial testing. It certainly is unlikely, but what other explanation is there for the complete disappearance of the DQ6 off shelves on- and off-line? Because we’ve asked around, and it seems that the DQ6 is getting to be a lot harder to find in PC retailers across the US and Canada than it was a month ago – several stores in question no longer carry it, with no explanation as to why or even if they’ll be bringing it back sometime soon… despite popular demand!

Gigabyte has only (very) recently become a “trusted” name in hardware; their motherboards – even as recently as last year – were considered to be of inferior quality and more of the proverbial bark than the “byte,” (pun intended). But since the release of Intel’s highly-successful Conroe/Core 2 product line, they’ve quickly to the top of most of the web’s recommended retailers list. As Gigabyte’s stock-chart attests, they’ve gained quite a lot since the Conroe debut – which in turn implies that they’ve got quite a lot to lose too, and plenty of reasons to silently discontinue what could turn out to be a not-so-great product afterall… but we hope that’s not the case – if only for the sake of the thousands of enthusiasts who’ve spent their money on the P35-DQ6 and its ilk.

We’ve contacted NewEgg with regards to the availablity of the P35-DQ6 and hope to receive some form of answer to this highly-puzzling question soon.