X38 Launch & Gigabyte X38-DQ6 Quad Review - PAGE 1

Yes kids, its time for another chipset launch.

Today Intel unveils the oft-rumored about X38 chipset – the follow up to the very successful 975X chipset; just like the P35 chipset was the successor to the 965P chipset.  For us the 975X is one of the best enthusiast chipsets ever made, with some of the top motherboard brands creating boards chock full of features and stability for the most severe overclocks.

So if the 975X is so great, you may well ask… what’s so great about the X38 chipset?

The biggest new features are:

• PCI Express 2.0 Dual x16 support
• DDR3 1333 support
• 1333MHz FSB support
• 1600MHz FSB support
• Unlocked bus ratios get official support
• Intel Extreme Memory support (basically the same as NVIDIA’s EPP)
• Intel Extreme Tuning Utility

Of course there is more, such as Core 2 Quad support, Turbo memory support, Fast Memory access, etc., but those have been around for a while.  Let's take a look at some slides from Intel's X38 presentation and dissect the new chipset a little further.

It is somewhat ironic seeing Intel push “Advanced memory and overclocking capabilities” in the above marketing slide; in the past Intel and AMD have done quite a bit to restrict overclocking, but now the Core 2 series of chipsets have given Intel a huge boost in consumer confidence in no small part thanks to the superior performance and overclocking headroom of the chips.  This slide make me wonder if maybe Intel will make a more public push of overclocking and even unlock the multipliers on their processors in the future? (Unlock in the upwards direction, I mean!)

Intel is really pushing DDR3 here in the below slide – and they do have a point. DDR3 will scale better to higher frequencies than DDR2, and my most recent reviews, including a look at OCZ's PC3-14400 and Super Talent's DDR3-1866 memory, have shown that high end DDR3 can turn in some very decent performance numbers. Unfortunately, at this time the price/performance ratio of DDR3 is just not there, with DDR3 having a significant price premium over DDR2.

And below, you can see Intel really likes its “Extreme Memory” specification; which is basically the same as NVIDIA’s EPP – both specify additional information on the fastest timings the modules can run at in the EEPROM on the memory sticks so that the BIOS can automatically set the memory to its highest rated specification.