Thoughts, HEXUS.right2reply, further reading
From our brief initial testing of the X38 chipset and the Foxconn X38A mainboard, it's hard to come to a solid conclusion.
Due to the fact that the motherboard didn't ship with the final cooling design and has a pre-production BIOS, we deferred overclocking the board - potentially one of the big draws of the X38 chipset - and, further, were unable to ascertain if the chipset fitted to our sample was production silicon or whether there is still a re-spin to come.
This combined with the pre-release BIOS means that we simply don't know if X38 is going to offer any kind of noticeable performance improvement over the P35 or nForce 680i SLI.
On a more positive note, the Foxconn X38A board is well laid out and its combination of DDR2 and DDR3 memory slots means that it neatly bridges the gap between the two memory technologies - buy DDR2 now and then simply drop in DDR3 when affordable, high-performance modules become available.
Of course, X38 is not going to be a cheap chipset. Based on our initial testing and some educated guesswork, we can't imagine the average P35 or 680i owner is going to be rushing out to upgrade unless overclocking performance proves to be absolutely phenomenal.
It's a very complete chipset but, in terms of bangs for bucks, the P35 will most likely match it for single-GPU and CrossFire configurations, while the 680i remains the logical choice if you want to run SLI.
However, it would be unfair of us to pass judgment until we've been able to test production-ready boards. So, for now, we are going to leave the X38 and Foxconn's X38A unrated.
They are, seemingly, at very least, performance equals to the competition but it remains to see if they can move that step ahead.
HEXUS Right2Reply
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