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Overclocking

The Gigabyte X38-DQ6 Quad turned out to be a decent overclocker.

I guess I must be jaded, as a couple of years ago reaching a maximum stable FSB of 480MHz (1920MHz equivalent data rate) would have blown me away; however after having achieved stable FSB's as high as 507MHz (2020MHz data rate) 480MHz does not seem quite as impressive as before.

When running with an 8x multiplier, the maximum stable speed of our Core 2 Duo E6400 on this board was an impressive 3.6GHz - air cooled.

In case you are wondering, we have standardized the E6400 as our motherboard review processor some time ago, as it was a great overclocker and we had a number of them in the lab. No doubt once 45nm Penryn's flood the market we will revisit our choice :-)

In order to reach 3.6GHz, we used the following settings:

• Vcore at 1.55875
• FSB Overvoltage at +0.15V
• MCH Overvoltage at +0.20V
• DDR2 Overvoltage at +0.50V
• a Noctua 12 CPU cooler with dual 12cm 63cfm fans

A quick note about the "Overvoltage" settings... I really wish the X38-DQ6's BIOS would show default voltages; our Corsair 8888's require 2.3V, and the only place that it was mentioned that the default DDR voltage was 1.8V was on the PC Health screen.

Conclusion

I've been waiting for some time to review the new X38 chipset; and given the outstanding performance of its predecessor, the 975X, I had great hopes that it would outperform the P35 chipset like the 975X outperformed the 965P.

Reality was more complicated than my hopes.

There is no doubt that the Gigabyte X38-DQ6 Quad is an excellent high-end, high performance board.

Unfortunately its memory performance is not where I expected it to be; and its lower priced sibling, the P35, can significanlty outperform the X38 on memory benchmarks.

But wait.

That's not the whole story.

The X38 does seem to have excellent PCIe throughput, and also is able to make use of full SATA2 burst rates, something we have not seen recently.

If you go back and look over our test results, you will see that the Gigabyte X38-DQ6 tended to dominate all but the memory benchmarks - so there is solid performance here; and for dual PCIe x16 CrossFire solutions on an Intel platform, it's the only real game in town. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, we did not have a chance to try CrossFire on this board yet, however we may do so if there is enough interest expressed by you, our readers.

Given how responsive Gigabyte was with BIOS updates, I have no doubt that they will continue tweaking their BIOS and improving memory performance. After this review is published, I will try the unreleased BIOS they just sent me last night to see if it improves the memory benchmarks; and if it does, I will update this article. Frankly, even with the sub-par memory performance this board was so good in the other benchmarks that I don't hesitate to recommend it, especially to gamers who wish to use CrossFire.

Once CrossFire cards (and drivers) are able to take full advantage of PCIe 2.0 x16 slots, we may see even better CrossFire scaling than before - however I suspect we will have to wait for the next generation of GPU's, and even more graphics heavy games, before the difference becomes significant. I also really wish that Intel and NVIDIA would work out an SLI licensing deal for Intel based boards; it would be very interesting to see SLI running on this platform as well.

In the end, the Gigabyte X38-DQ6 Quad is a heck of a board regardless of slightly lower memory performance than expected. Given that it is one of the first dual x16 PCIe 2.0 solutions for Core 2 Duo's and Quads, and especially given Gigabyte's responsiveness, I have no qualms about recomending this board for enthusiasts. Frankly, a hair less memory performance will be overshadowed by the ability to run CrossFire as a dual x16 solution versus a 16x + 4x asymetric configuration.