I have say upfront that this launch is turning into a flaming pile of (whatever comes to mind) at this point. Intel has done some masterful schedule executions that last year on CPUs and the P35 chipset, but this release is turning into a hodgepodge of product designs and various release dates, something that has surprised us as this is Intel's flagship chipset release for the next eight months or so.
Except for a couple of X38 boards from Gigabyte and ASUS, the launch this Wednesday is more of a formality than anything. We have several engineering sample boards but we will not be showing results from them as the X38 chipset is at various revision levels and some of the boards have undergone a redesign. We could offer more preview numbers, but some of the boards cannot even be updated with the latest BIOS spins, so, we will skip it.
We will have full retail kit reviews on the ASUS P5E3 Deluxe and Gigabyte GA-X38T-DQ6, both of which underwent significant changes with the BIOS spins just today (so far, much better, especially with 4x1GB configurations and Quad Core overclocking). We have a couple of retail DDR2 boards arriving tomorrow, but will not be able to get those in the launch article, it will be next week unfortunately.
Even the last production X38-DQ6 sample board we have from Gigabyte is slightly different than the retail board showing up in the channels now. It appears right now that a vast majority of X38 designs will not hit the market until late this month. On a side note, we do have both of the ASUS Maximus boards (retail) arriving in a couple of days. We plan on showing results on these boards with everything from high-end water/air to two stage Cascade shortly, so that should be interesting.