Hi,
Intel had to respin the X38 due to compatibility issues with a few PCIe 2.0 cards and some other items of interest. The latest chipsets have been delivered to the manufacturers and most are in full production at this point. A few of the boards required component changes so those designs are being retested at this point. It appears now that retail boards will probably show up by the 9/24 release date although it is looking more and more like supply and additional designs will not be in plentiful supply until October.
Also, early tests on final silicon indicate that the chipset performs better with DDR3 than DDR2 on like boards, hint DDR2-1066 at 4-4-4-12 and DDR3-1066 5-5-4-12 perform within a percent of each other on this chipset which is something we could not say on the P35. We are running overclocked benchmarks at this time and seeing DDR3 showing significant gains over DDR2 up top with the X38, however, still waiting on final BIOS releases so it could change. I say this, as the last BIOS spin for the DDR3 boards improved performance up to 9% in several benchmarks but we have not received updated DDR2 code in over a week.
For those interested in CrossFire performance, not seeing a real significant increase in performance yet when compared to the 975X, once again this could change, or more likely the HD 2900XT cards are just not pushing enough data yet to matter (at least with current games and the wonderful world of Vista). I will have initial CF results up in a couple of days.
Intel had to respin the X38 due to compatibility issues with a few PCIe 2.0 cards and some other items of interest. The latest chipsets have been delivered to the manufacturers and most are in full production at this point. A few of the boards required component changes so those designs are being retested at this point. It appears now that retail boards will probably show up by the 9/24 release date although it is looking more and more like supply and additional designs will not be in plentiful supply until October.
Also, early tests on final silicon indicate that the chipset performs better with DDR3 than DDR2 on like boards, hint DDR2-1066 at 4-4-4-12 and DDR3-1066 5-5-4-12 perform within a percent of each other on this chipset which is something we could not say on the P35. We are running overclocked benchmarks at this time and seeing DDR3 showing significant gains over DDR2 up top with the X38, however, still waiting on final BIOS releases so it could change. I say this, as the last BIOS spin for the DDR3 boards improved performance up to 9% in several benchmarks but we have not received updated DDR2 code in over a week.
For those interested in CrossFire performance, not seeing a real significant increase in performance yet when compared to the 975X, once again this could change, or more likely the HD 2900XT cards are just not pushing enough data yet to matter (at least with current games and the wonderful world of Vista). I will have initial CF results up in a couple of days.
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