X38 DDR2 flavours proliferate - Gigabyte is next

INTEL'S X38 chipset is expected to give the Nforce 680i a run for its money when it comes to features - up to four PCI-E x16 v2 slots - performance and, especially, overclocking.

However, the current DDR3 RAM is too expensive and slow, latency-wise, to let it take the benchmark throne easily.

The vendors have heeded the advice, and you'll see Asus, MSI and Gigabyte among others offering an optimised DDR2-based X38 mainboard - hopefully without the performance oddities I saw with my P35.

Here is Gigabyte's brand new X38 DDR2 board, the GA-X38-DQ6 - as you can see, the full feature set is there, just that you don't need to throw away your DDR2 anymore to keep up with all the PCI-E v2 and FSB2000+ stuff. After all, benchmark wise, some nice DDR2-1200CL4 RAM will probably give you the best results there, still. µ