Gigabyte GA-X38T-DQ6

Zitat

Gigabyte's GA-X38T-DQ6 is a board we've found great favour in. We've found it very hard to fault the layout if you choose a heatsink that doesn't need to be bolted to the motherboard and even as an engineering sample it's worked flawlessly throughout our testing. There has been some niggles with the Ethernet adapters but the retail boards are working as expected and should be shipping very soon.

It's been a fantastic board to work with even in this early stage, but from the looks of pre-orders, it will be expensive at around £190. Therefore only time will tell if the bundle, stability and extra features due from Intel make it worth the while. Nvidia could command a price premium on the nForce 680i SLI because it had EPP and SLI, but is CrossFire and Intel's Extreme Memory held in the same regard? At least the X38 chipset should provide a diverse range of motherboard options, unlike the nForce 680i SLI, and being an Intel chipset we'd expect it to be far more reliable as well.

The current performance isn't outstandingly ground breaking compared to a P35 board with DDR3 memory, however it is a bit faster on many accounts and the P35 boards have had mature BIOSes for a little while now. In comparison, I would expect at least a few months wait on X38 to really get the best out of it, at least before anything from Nvidia arrives in Q4.