The arrival of a new Intel motherboard chipset isn't always a cause for much rejoicing. After all, Intel has a nasty habit of churning out new chipsets so fast the solder has hardly set on existing boards. But its new X38 performance chipset is a little different. For as long as it lasts...
Unusually for Intel, its outgoing high end chipset, the 975X, was a seriously crusty old critter. It's been kicking around for two years. Making matters worse, the release of its latest mainstream chipset, the P35, left the 975X looking even more pointless and outdated.
All hail the new king
A warn welcome, therefore, to the new X38 performance chipset. The most obvious upgrades over the 975X include official support for 1333MHz bus Intel processors along with the latest 45nm Core 2 chips and DDR3 memory.
Of course, the mainstream P35 already offers most of that. Moreover, the P35 has proven an extremely impressive performer at both stock and overclocked settings. So, why pay more for an X38-powered board?
For starters it brings full support for the new Core 2 Extreme QX9650 45nm CPU. The P35 only officially tangos with the cooking versions of Intel's new 45nm Core 2 chips. But really, it's all about the X38's northbridge chip.
Firstly, Intel claims it delivers improvements to memory performance courtesy of a revised memory snoop feature. In simple terms, memory snoop allows the caching of commonly requested data in the northbridge, thereby avoiding the need to fetch it from main memory.
Next up is support for the latest 1333MHz DDR3 memory. On paper, that gives the X38 an advantage over the P35 which tops out at 1066MHz. In practice, many P35-based boards cope just fine with DDR3 DIMMs running in 1333MHz trim. Then again, both of the early X38 motherboards from Asus and Gigabyte we have seen claim support for DDR3 memory up to 1600MHz.
What's more, the X38 retains support for DDR2, giving both board makers and buyers the option to stick with more affordable DDR2 memory technology until DDR3 prices begin their final descent from the stratosphere.
The X38 also sports a number of enthusiast-friendly features. Most notable is XMP or Extreme Memory Profile. It's essentially a set of ehnanced memory profiles designed to boost bandwidth with compatible memory DIMMs. If that sounds familiar it's because Nvidia's EPP initiative is pretty much identical.
