Gigabyte X38-DQ6 Motherboard Review – Intel X38 Arrives!

Our testing time with the Gigabyte X38-DQ6 was focused mainly on the performance of the board in the world of overclocking and stability, though of course we had to make sure the motherboard performed up to, or beyond, the levels of the existing P35 motherboards we have been testing over the past few months.

As has been the case with most platform chipset updates over recent years, the advantages from chipset to chipset are relatively small if even noticeable at all.  In this case, we are testing a DDR2 motherboard against other DDR2 motherboards, and though Intel claims the memory controller on the X38 is much more advanced than that on the P35, I tend to believe that there is more overlap than they let on.  Our tests will show us for sure.

Here is our test setup for the following benchmarks:

The only differences we see here with the X38 motherboard is in the pure synthetic memory test; we see a jump of over 160 MB/s in transfer rate with the same memory timings, etc.  That is actually pretty impressive, but it won’t result in any kind of performance gains in standard applications worth writing about. 

DDR3 memory on other X38 motherboards WILL perform better, as we mentioned earlier, but the cost of it is still prohibitive for enthusiasts at this point.