Author: William Henning
Editor: Howard Ha
Publish Date: Wednesday, October 10th, 2007
Originally Published on Neoseeker (http://www.neoseeker.com)
Article Link: http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/gigabyte_x38-dq6/
Copyright Neo Era Media, Inc. - please do not redistribute or use for commercial purposes.
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:
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.
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.
With the X38, Intel is continuing its push to migrate the market from DDR2 to DDR3.
The X38 still supports DDR2 memory as Intel could hardly afford to make the chipset exclusively DDR3 at this time - the price premium currently attached to DDR3 memory is a major deterrent to the average enthusiast and certainly to people who want to maximize their gaming or performance bang for the buck. However Intel had three slides promoting DDR3 in the presentation:
Due to running at a lower voltage, I do not doubt that DDR3 has a 25% lower TDP when compared to DDR2 running at the same speed, however I am surprised that Intel is touting a mere 10% performance gain in going from DDR2-800 to DDR3-1333 - which is an apples to oranges comparison, and personally I do not find a 10% performance increase from memories running 66.7% faster compelling.
Intel is however correct that overclocked DDR3 can be significantly faster; in my latest tests, I've found that DDR3-1800 starts to turn in really good performance (more on this in my aforementioned OCZ DDR3-1800 analysis).
I am troubled by the constant comparison of DDR2-800 to DDR3-1333 as DDR2-800 is mainstream, and at this time DDR3-1333 is still almost considered to be performance memory... not to mention the price differential between DDR2-800 and DDR3-1333.
I do however totally agree with Intel that the long term potential of DDR3 is better, so their continued push to drive migration to DDR3 is actually the logical one for the future.
Here's the meat of the story:
DDR3-1066 is 1.4x the price of DDR2-1066, and 5x the cost of DDR2-667. Going by Intel's figures, DDR2-667 ought to have similar performance to DDR3-1066... so who would spend 5x times as much for DDR3 memory to get the same performance? Or 1.4x to get lower performance?
Once a price parity between DDR2 and DDR3 of at least one speed grade higher is reached, DDR3 will become a very interesting proposition. Regardless, the question of DDR2 vs DDR3 isn't totally relevant to the X38, since the chipset supports both and buyers will choose the memory platform they want to go with when choosing X38 boards.
Okay, enough about the X38 chipset, let's now talk about the Gigabyte X38-DQ6 Quad, which happens to be a DDR2 X38 board and one aimed for the performance enthusiast and gamer!
The Gigabyte X38-DQ6 Quad is definitely a high-end motherboard.
Whew. You will find a complete copy of its specifications straight off the Gigabyte site below.
The Gigabyte X38-DQ6 is a performance motherboard -- and it defintely looks the part.
The Bundle
What can you say about any motherboard bundle?
Here we have two slot covers with the eSATA connectors, the ATX I/O back plate, four SATA2 cables, an IDE cable, floppy cable, quick assembly guide and driver/utility CD. And a case sticker of course.
Specifications
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| Rear Panel I/O |
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| BIOS |
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| Other Features |
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As you can see from the shot below, the Gigabyte X38-DQ6 Quad has Gigabyte's "Crazy Cool" heatsink on the back - as a matter of fact, it even has a smaller one for the south bridge. The "Crazy Cool", for those that don't know, is the large metal plate you see on the back of the motherboard that Gigabyte's marketing materials claim will improve heat dissipation.
Does Crazy Cool help with chipset cooling?
Probably to some degree; however it is a pain in the posterior for mounting high end processor heatsinks, many of which have their own custom brackets to place on the back of the motherboard.
In order to mount our Noctua-12 cooler, we had to use four motherboard standoffs so that the "X" shaped Noctua back plate would fit over the Crazy Cool heatsink. It's kind of a trick that many home users aren't going to be happy to have to employ.
Let's start our tour of the motherboard.
The DIMM slots are between the power and IDE connectors and the north bridge and processor socket; and unfortunately they are just a bit too close to let us use the yellow pair of sockets with our Noctua mounted. Note the extra four pin power connector beside the main ATX connector.
Fortunately the heat pipes and heatsinks are cleared by the Noctua, otherwise we might have had to use an inferior heatsink for the review. Look at all those solid state capacitors!
Here we see the eight SATA2 connectors, and the 90' angle-mounted IDE connector.
Look at those two PCIe 2.0 x16 slots... just waiting for CrossFire cards - and if Intel and NVIDIA make nice, perhaps SLI later?
With PCIe 2.0 doubling the data throughput, those three 1x slots are more useful then ever. Now if only peripherals such as video grabbers became available in PCIe 2.0 1x versions...
The two legacy PCI slots are very useful, however a double slot cooler would block one of them if two video cards were installed.
Last, but not least, we have the I/O panel.
I really like seeing eight USB connectors here, along with FireWire and mini-FireWire. Note the plethora of audio connectors - a classic six connector style set of connections on the right, and an SP/DIFF and Optical connection on the right.
The PS2 keyboard and mouse ports are welcome too.
The BIOS
The Gigabyte X38-DQ6 uses a standard AWARD BIOS, to which Gigabyte has added a number of features like the "M.I.T." Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker, saving and loading of BIOS configurations, and reflashing the BIOS.
Editor's Note: Gigabyte was kind enough to send a total of three new BIOS revisions thanks to our feedback during the course of our review, the last of which came in too late for us to include results in the review. Should that BIOS make a significant difference to our memory benchmarks, we will update this review.
As you can see below, the main menu and most of the other screens are pretty standard.
There are up to two IDE and ten SATA devices.
You can check the capacity of each attached device, as well as set its access mode.
The Advanced BIOS menu lets you configure boot priority and processor features such as EIST.
The Integrated Peripherals screen lets you enable or disable the on-board peripherals.
And we also have a typical power management screen.
As the years have passed, the IRQ management through the BIOS has become ever more limited - in this case we are down to influencing just two IRQ's.
The PC Health status is quite important, as it is the only place where we find out that the "default" DDR2 voltage is 1.8V.
Ah, we finally get to the Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker... this is were the action is for overclockers.
When overclocking, it is important to lock the PCIe frequency to 100MHz - you can try to up it a bit (up to 25MHz) once you found out the highest stable processor overclock.
I always turn off automatic overclocking features, and I override the SPD timings manually to what I know works best for the given module I use.
Unfortunately Gigabyte is still using a voltage offset for DDR2, MCH and FSB; personally I'd prefer it it allowed me to set it in terms of absolute voltage; or at least if it showed the default values here!
I REALLY like it that Gigabyte offers eight stored BIOS profiles; when experimenting to find the maximum overclock it is very helpful to save useful milestone settings so you can quickly go back to them.
I also like that these days major vendors are building in BIOS reflashing tools into the BIOS, and that these tools can read files from thumb drives. Finally, floppy drives can be resigned to the dust bins of history!
Test Setup
We made the test systems as similar as we could, other than the memory - so it should give us some very interesting results! Hardware for testing of the Gigabyte X38-DQ6 Quad:
Other motherboards tested (with same components):
Benchmarks Used For now, here is a listing of the tests performed: Video drivers used were the NVIDIA ForceWare version 93.71 package.
Business Winstone
The Gigabyte X38-DQ6 simply dominated the Business Winstone results.
When clocked at 266x8 it outperformed the 680i and P35 chipsets; and its maximum overclocks left the competition eating its dust.
Well done!
Content Creation
I see we have a repeat performance here.
At stock, the X38-DQ6 slightly outperformed its competitors, and at its maximum overclock, it dominated the chart.
WinRAR
The stock result with 1066FSB did not fare well here, for some reason the X38 chipset - at least as implemented on this board - does not seem to have good DDR2 performance at low clock speeds.
At 1333MHz FSB, the results looked better, and at the max overclock, the X38-DQ6 topped the chart.
HDTach
FINALLY whatever has been plaguing recent SATA-2 HD Tach results is history.
The X38-DQ6 simply dominates the results, and actually achieves excellent results clearly indicating SATA-2 speeds.
Unfortunately the IDE performance of the X38-DQ6 is very poor. As a matter of fact the results remind me of the speeds achieved by USB connected hard drives, like in the last chart on this page.
USB performance is pretty much a wash among the competitors, and other than at a 1066MHz FSB, the processor utilization for the X38-DQ6 was so close to zero that it did not register.
Lame MP3
For LAME, the Gigabyte X38-DQ6 performs poorly at the 1066FSB setting, however it performs slightly better than the other contenders at 1333FSB, and tops the chart at the maximum achieved overclock (1800FSB)
TMPGEnc
For TMPGEnc, even the 1066FSB tests for the X38-DQ6 beat the same FSB contenders. It wins at 1333FSB and the overclocked result takes the top spot.
XVid
XVid was not as kind to the X38-DQ6, for some reason - presumably memory performance - it did not do as well as the other boards.
Call of Duty
Oh my.
The Gigabyte X38-DQ6 rocked for Call of Duty; especially when overclocked.
Comanche 4
The X38-DQ6 did well at 1066FSB and 1333FSB, and rocked when overclocked.
Doom 3
Doom is well known to be very sensitive to memory performance, which explains why the Gigabyte X38-DQ6 had the worst Doom result at the 1066FSB setting.
Fortunately, the X38-DQ6 redeemed itself when overclocked, and also performed well at 1333FSB.
Quake 4
The X38-DQ6 turned in an average result at 1066FSB, slightly better than average at 1333FSB, and did very well when overclocked to the max.
Halo
The X38-DQ6 had run of the mill results at 1066FSB, and slightly better than average at 1333FSB - and topped the chart when overclocked.
Jedi Knight
Ok, there is a definite pattern here. The X38-DQ6 again tops the chart overclocked, and is with the pack at standard FSB speeds.
Unreal Tournament 2004
No surprises here.
Sandra
As we would expect, the X38-DQ6 ranks high, and purely according to processor frequency, in the Sandra CPU test.
This is where we get to see the one weakness of the board - DDR2 performance.
Don't get me wrong - the performance is more than adequate - but frankly, a P35 outperforms this X38 board for memory benchmarks.
RightMark Read
The read benchmark shows it very clearly - the Gigabyte X38-DQ6 is simply not as fast as the P35 or the n680 for memory read bandwidth.
RightMark Write
Or for memory write bandwidth.
RightMark Latency
Please ignore the top three results - the RightMark Latency benchmark could not accurately measure latency with the n680i chipset, and returned a negative minimum read latency on the P35-DS3R.
The rest of the results though show something interesting - the X38, even when programmed for low latencies, is simply higher latency than the P35 - at least on the Gigabyte X38-DQ6. I'll know more after I test a couple of more X38 based boards - I should have another arriving this week.
RightMark Bandwidth
Strangely enough, the RightMark Bandwidth benchmark really likes the X38.
Perhaps Intel optimized for mixed access? I don't know. The X38 simply did poorly for the individual latency, read and write tests, so I am at a loss to explain how it does so well for the bandwidth benchmark.
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:
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.
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