X38: should I even bother?

[FSH42NA]

All this talk of the impending release of X38 and it's sli advantages has me wondering if there are any other real advantages for me over the current P35 boards out there now.

My needs:

Stability
Modest overclocking
NO sli anticipated
A need to not spend over $300 for a mobo
Ability to use DDR2


My gut feeling is to just go with the P35 and upgrade to the X38's successor a couple of years down the road after all the bugs are worked out and DDR3 is cheap.

Thanks for your thoughts

 

[MDE]

If you're not going to run SLI I'd just get a P35 board. Mine (DFI Infinity T2RL I believe, there's a thread in this forum I started on it) was about $150 and gets the job done very well without any shortcuts like PCI Gigabit LAN or sacrificing overclockability.

 

[Nickel020]

The X38 will only be slightly faster than the P35 when using DDR2, but it will be considerably faster when using DDR3. That's what the first reports say. So for a DDR2 system there's not muchr eason to get a X38, unless you absolutely want the highest overclock and the best performance and are willing to pay for it. Otherwise it's better to buy a cheaper P35 board and invest the saved money into a better video card or CPU.

And the X38 does NOT offcially support SLI. It's technically possible, but Intel did not get a SLI license, so there will be no offcial support.