x38 chipsets arriving far sooner than predicted

According to sources over at AnandTech forums, namely one of their editors, the x38 reference boards are already being sent out to reviewers and that the chipset is going to be launch far ahead of the originally scheduled lifting of the press NDA on September 23rd.

Some say Sept 7th, some say the 9th, and some say the 11th, but regardless of date ASUS and Gigabyte and perhaps one other 1st-tier motherboard provider is going to be releasing their boards sometime in the next two or three weeks.

With DDR3 support (with DD2 support options still available), PCI 2.0, and a variety of other new features they are expected to perform at equal or 5% better levels at stock speeds with the current P35 chipset, but are overclocking monsters that could push system performance into the stratosphere. In fact, Intel claims that its upcoming X38 chipset will be one hell of a overclocking miracle and that it will drive DDR3 memory all the way to 2.4GHz. Currently you really need to push P35 motherboards to get to 1600 MHz.

While it may not support SLi, it does support Crossfire and is *capable* in theory of running SLi should the right marketing circumstances (or creatively inspired drivers from a third party ) arise. Rumors are circling that Intel engineers are saying this will make a huge break into the enthusiast gaming market. Intel is in fact designing its own enthusiast-level reference board (codenamed Bonetrail) for the first time in this chipset offering, and it is rumored to have jaw-dropping performance.

AnandTech is currently running tests on the boards they have thus far:

Everest Results - X38 Stock - Vista 64, 4GB DDR2 Memory, Q6600, Auto Settings, Early BIOS, performance should improve around 3%~5% by launch.

More results to follow, but that's where they are at now.

I'm personally very excited to see this. With the upcoming Series9 geforce cards already taped out and ready for release in november (which is now fully confirmed by a few inside sources) coupled with the PCI 2.0 capability of the new boards and overclocking potential even with DD2 memory, the sky (and your cooling solution) is the limit for performance potential. Gigabyte has already stated that they intend to release a DDR2 board first, which is good news for those unwilling to  make the switch to the costlier memory for now.




Edited by CapnBiggles - 29 Aug 2007 at 2:14pm