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The X38 Chipset

Below is a slide about Intel’s Extreme Tuning utility, which appears to be a nice system monitor / tuner similar to what NVIDIA, Asus, Gigabyte and others have been shipping for a long time.  This seems like a step in the right direction as the success NVIDIA's utilities especially show that users appreciate having these tools at their disposal.  It also shows Intel being open minded in the way they are targetting their performance chipsets.

Personally, what I am interested in finding out is how many overclocking features will be supported as the X38 matures - something to follow up on as we review additional X38 boards.

The next slide deals with PCIe 2.0.  I must admit that I like the potential increase in bandwidth that PCIe 2.0 brings, and I like the fact that the X38 has enough lanes for dual PCIe x16 slots – never mind that I’ve yet to see a large performance difference between current SLI/Crossfire x8 and x16 solutions with PCIe v1.1!

It will be interesting to see how much performance benefits the extra bandwidth will bring once PCIe 2.0 video cards arrive and as higher resolutions and massive textures become the norm.

What I like is that the smaller PCIe slots – the 1x and 4x auxiliary slots – will also double in bandwidth, and as such will become more useful.

X38 also brings newer SATA drivers; and I like the eSATA Port Multiplier for allowing additional external drives - and I am sure the hardware was tweaked some more as well.

All the interest in the X38 is overshadowing the G35 news; so here is a bit about this new IGP from Intel…

Basically, the G35 is supposed to bring higher gaming performance, and better video playback.

I am sure Intel has made decent improvements, but the fact remains that an IGP graphics solution cannot be competitive with add-on graphics cards until the memory bandwidth is similar.  In spite of this the G35 should make for interesting setups for home theater PC's and OEMs.