Intel X38 : Overclocking Update
The launch of the Intel X38 Express chipset occurred two weeks ago amidst a lot of early hype about its potential and performance improvements over previous chipsets. The X38 chipset is finally starting to show some promise after several BIOS releases over the past two weeks on the first retail boards ASUS and Gigabyte. However, we are still not ready to declare the chipset a winner. The chipset is not a disappointment at this stage in the game, but the whole launch event fiasco and lack of choices available in the marketplace is disappointing to us.
We are busily completing an extensive testing phase on this new chipset with the ASUS, Gigabyte, abit, and Foxconn boards that we currently have in the labs. We expect retail boards shortly from MSI and Biostar with Intel and DFI following up sometime in November with their products. In the meantime, we have received an avalanche of requests centered on which board performs best out of the available products currently for sale.
We are very close to answering those questions as testing is nearing completion now. However, we did notice a central theme in the majority of the requests and it revolved around the overclocking aspects of the boards and performance comparisons to the current chipsets. We will show the comparisons against other chipsets in the full board reviews and offer in-depth overclocking results with multiple CPU and memory configurations. The quick overview we are presenting today will help set the stage for those articles by answering our maximum FSB rates attained with the Intel Q6600 and E6550
