X38 Chipset

[T2k]

Never mind...

 

[Duwelon]

I think Nemesis 1 needs to go back on his meds.

 

[Griswold]

Originally posted by: Nemesis 1
This could be true.But maybe the 60 billion dollars AMD wants from intel for bully marketing has intel thinking . We have to beat these clowns down bad now. They started a lawsuite against us when they had the performance edge. Intel probabably has done nothing wrong for quite a while. So maybe intel wants to show the courts AMD just plain cann't compete' Even after they reversed engineered intels processor . If any one is done criminal actions its been AMD and IBM . IBM always lerking watching . If ever their has been a monoply its IBM . Their right there with ATT and Standard oil. They even played footsie with hitler during the war after we entered it. IBM even used its monoply powers to make Intel let AMD produce x86 processors. Intel was FORCED to do this by IBM. THan AMD reversed enginneered intels cpu and started marketing as their own .

Is anyone in CHINA reading this . Its alright you can reverse engineer Intels cores . It legal US courts have already set presedence. On top of that the full details is hidden from the public of the settlement another illeagal act( public traded company Stock holders have right to full disclosure as they own the company). Full disclosure is law. Unless you are the law.

Usually, people like you are dragged out to the streets to have some sense beaten through their thick skulls, but in your case it would be considered cruelty against a child. :roll:

 

[Jedipottsy]

Originally posted by: Gary Key

Originally posted by: Nemesis 1

Originally posted by: dinos22

Originally posted by: Gary Key

Originally posted by: dinos22


Hi! Dinos. Explain something to me please. How is it that people in power( web masters) Keep saying wait for newer steppings of K10 they will be great. Yet none are saying Penryn is using A0 stepping on a totally new process with tweaks. And is doing great. What happens when Penryn B0 steppings come out and than B1 steppings. Amd gains from new steppings on an old process using soi. Yet Intel will see NO improvements with a totally new process tech . Using A0 steppings . Sure are a lot of AMD fanbois using Intel cpu's . Sheep in wolves clothing . Because in the last year the only thing that has been said about AMD Vs. Intel that I find 100% true . Is Intel is the preditor here, That is a fact. But I will go with the wolf on this one as AMD lacks a good sheppard.

X38 isn't for the faint hearted its for the pure enthusiast . Because its the only way well see A 15-20% performance increase over c2d. Using a penryn cpu.
X38 is for Penryn. X38 is were penryn will shine . X38 with penryn along with multipol drives in raid 0 is were the real performance will come from. X38 = $$$$
No need to say the benefits aren't worth the extra price as thats for people to make choice their $$$ their choice. Just because MANY won't spend for ultra performance no need to cut that extra cost because your unwilling to spend the cash for 20% more performance.

Now this only applies to Intel . If AMD K10 is 20% faster than C2D than and only than will more people be interested in gaining that insignifecant 20% performance gain . LOL!

Actually for Penryn, the A1 stepping is great. I have already seen a 3% improvement with a retail X38 over the engineering board and overclocking is a completely different, but we are waiting for the retail BIOS release later this week before presenting final X38 numbers.

Have u got the retail BIOS? Is it worth waiting for X38 or is P35 just as good? (Building a new rig)

 

[CountChoculaBot]

Is Bonetrail/BadAxe3 (same thing right? or no?) DDR2 compatible? I saw a pic of a slide where they said either X38 in general or Bonetrail (Didn't specify) can handle both DDR2 and DDR3. Now, my question is, is this talking about Bonetrail and does that mean that the 4 RAM slots on Bonetrail can handle BOTH DDR2 and DDR3 (Or if it even has 6 RAM slots like that one X38 board, where 4 slots can handle DDR3 and the other two do DDR2)? Or is it talking about X38 mobo's can handle DDR2 or DDR3 depending on what the mobo maker wants (like Asus Maximus Formula doing DDR2)?

 

[Nickel020]

Gary, when can we expect a review of retails boards? You stated earlier that you already have a retail X38 DQ6 and were just waiting for the final BIOS which should be out by now (boards hitting retailers soon).
Does the NDA still hold until the 24th or why are there no reviews on the net?
Quite a strange "launch" of the chipset, there's not even a press release on the Intel website mentioning it... maybe the launch on the 9th was just a false rumour.

 

[CapnBiggles]

Originally posted by: Nickel020
Quite a strange "launch" of the chipset, there's not even a press release on the Intel website mentioning it... maybe the launch on the 9th was just a false rumour.

Yeah this is all slightly oddball so far, I have to agree.

 

[T2k]

Seems Abit boards start shipping end of this month: http://www.tweaktown.com/news/...s_in_taipei/index.html

 

[BLHealthy4life]

Gary has made a new thread updating X38 info:

X38 Update :

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.

 

[Nemesis 1]

9% increase in certain Benchies not to shabby it will get better add in the Penryn performance boost of say 5-10% + with first retail cpu's and we could easily see 20% in gains Penryn performance in certain benchies = K10 results over K8 with early silcon on the penryn . So its only going to get better. Glag to see that Gary is seeing what I have seen finely.

 

[blanketyblank]

For a top of the line abit board I was expecting heatpipes for cooling, yet the higher end DDR3 board is strangely lacking and the fan isn't even included...
Could it mean that DDR3 is that much cooler that heatpipes aren't necessary?

Anyways seems to suck that there's no hybrid ddr2/3 board that I've seen. I'd rather not go to DDR3 till prices start falling, but I've been saving for quite some time to get a new mobo and the x38s the only one with all the new features including pci-ex 2.0.

 

[8ounce]

Originally posted by: blanketyblank

Anyways seems to suck that there's no hybrid ddr2/3 board that I've seen. I'd rather not go to DDR3 till prices start falling, but I've been saving for quite some time to get a new mobo and the x38s the only one with all the new features including pci-ex 2.0.

Foxconn is making a board that takes both ddr2 and ddr3. MSI was aswell but changed to DDR3 only a couple of days ago.

 

[bka4u2c]

Thought I would share this bit of information about the x38 chipset that I read over at hothardware.com:

During his keynote today at IDF, Intel?s Pat Gelsinger showed off a machine based on the company?s Skulltrail enthusiast gaming platform. Skulltrail is a dual-socket platform based on the X38 chipset that supports Intel?s upcoming 45nm Quad-Core processors and offers PCI Express 2.0 support and true dual-x16 PEG slots (or four x8 PCI Express x16 slots).

What was interesting about the machine on display was that it used a pair of GeForce graphics cards running in SLI mode, but on an Intel chipset ? no nForce here. This would lead you to believe X38 will ?support? SLI, but that is not exactly the case. In a briefing later in the day, Stephen Smith revealed that Intel worked with NVIDIA to enable SLI for the demo machine, but did NOT confirm that NVIDIA would enable SLI on X38 for consumers.

Update: We've just got word that Intel (and perhaps some of their partners) will be using an nForce MCP on some of their X38 based motherboards, and it's these boards that will support SLI.

So its looks like hell may have frozen over and we may see SLI on x38. Maybe?

 

[Heidfirst]

why would Intel want to use an nVidia MCP?

 

[vmsein]

Originally posted by: Heidfirst
why would Intel want to use an nVidia MCP?

The simple answer is to allow the implementation of SLi on an Intel motherboard. We all know that right now nvidia's SLi is faster than AMD's Crossfire, and SLi is closely associated with an enthusiast setup. It sure would be nice for Intel to capture that segment of the enthusiast crowd willing to shell out big bucks for SLi on their next biggest motheboard release directly aimed at the enthusiast crowd. I for one, hope it's true, as the more choices we have, the better.

 

[Heidfirst]

but you don't technically need an nVidia MCP for SLI you just need gfx drivers that allow it to run.
X38 will run SLI fine with appropriate drivers & Intel's southbridges imo are better than nVidia's.
If Intel make & sell a mobo with an nVidia chipset (or part thereof) then they lose the value added profit from using their own chipset & not to mention that it would send a signal to the other mobo mfrs & customers that nVidia's chipset is better than Intel's ...

 

[Capt Caveman]

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/...p?ProductCode=10006785

 

[nrb]

Originally posted by: bka4u2c
So its looks like hell may have frozen over and we may see SLI on x38. Maybe?

No way in hell.

If you read the updated article on hothardware you will see:

The Skulltrail motherboard uses Intel's workstation ?Stoakley? chipset designed for 2P CPU operation (1P configurations are not supported).

To enable NVIDIA SLI support, Intel has purchased NVIDIA nForce 100 SLI MCPs from NVIDIA.

The NVIDIA nForce 100 MCP converts a single x16 PCI Express Gen 1 bus into dual x16 PCI Express Gen 1 buses. This is how SLI is being supported on Skulltrail.

NVIDIA assisted Intel in the bring-up and testing of the Skulltrail motherboard which was publicly demonstrated at the Intel Developers Forum in San Francisco this week.

NVIDIA SLI technology is the world?s leading multi-GPU platform, allowing multiple NVIDIA GeForce graphics processing units (GPUs) to work together, resulting in scalable performance.

Intel has not licensed SLI technology from NVIDIA. Intel purchased NVIDIA nForce 100 MCPs to enable support for SLI.

Skulltrail is the only Intel motherboard which will feature NVIDIA SLI support. Intel is not using the NVIDIA nForce 100 MCP on any other chipsets, including X38.

For other 1P segments of the Intel market, NVIDIA has a wide variety of SLI products already available, including the leading nForce 680i SLI MCP for enthusiasts and gamers.

Skulltrail motherboards will only be available directly from Intel.

To summarise: Skulltrail is not based on X38. Skulltrail boards will support SLI. X38 boards will not.

 

[Heidfirst]

Looks like Tomshardware went with the original launch date ... :roll:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/...byte,review-29644.html

I presume that this is a board with a rev 1. chipset & hopefully rev.2 is better because it doesn't look good otherwise.
The Intel overclocking utility looks to replicate a lot of what abit's uGuru does so they had better look to their laurels.

 

[Gary Key]

Originally posted by: Heidfirst
Looks like Tomshardware went with the original launch date ... :roll:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/...byte,review-29644.html

I presume that this is a board with a rev 1. chipset & hopefully rev.2 is better because it doesn't look good otherwise.
The Intel overclocking utility looks to replicate a lot of what abit's uGuru does so they had better look to their laurels.

Gigabyte just delivered the F4 BIOS for that board, Tom's does not say what they used but it was probably the F2A or F2D which, for a lack of better words, sucked. In fact, except for the abit board (beta BIOS though), most of the DDR2 boards are just not showing any real benefits at this time compared to the tuned P35 DDR2 boards from DFI, abit, or ASUS.

The real differences at this time is in DDR3 performance and when using Penryn. The other trend we have noticed in testing with our retail (as in purchased randomly from several etailers) cpus is that a lot of the E6X50 series CPUS are capping around 500FSB now. I think our GO Q6600 is one of the better overclocking CPUs we have in house now. We are going to do a change up and show maximum FSB capabilities in the overclocking section with a "ringer" CPU plus the normal results from our standard CPU selection.

Intel has been flip flopping on the release date again so we might dribble out one more article before the 11th but the plan is just to do a roundup on the 11th and catch the reminder of boards that are released after that in early November.

 

[SerpentRoyal]

I think you have a six sigma chip. All the dual/quad chips that I've come across maxed out at 506MHz FSB in 65F room (488MHz to pass Orthos/S&M's heat with Big Typhoon).

I don't see any advantage in pushing the FSB speed above 500MHz at this time.

 

[abhong]

so with the increase in performance in single digits... 2% ish or so... is the price reasonable?

i am seriously considering going this route but then i already own DDR2-1066's and QX6700 and so my budget is fixed...

i am hearing that there will be X38's avail in DDR2 but will it be worth it?

thanks...

 

[nrb]

Originally posted by: abhong
i am hearing that there will be X38's avail in DDR2 but will it be worth it?

Most likely not. Increasingly it's looking as though X38 needs DDR3 to perform to its potential. With DDR2 it's crippled.

(That, I suspect, is one of the main issues with the tomshardware review - thus far their only available X38 board is DDR2).

 

[BLHealthy4life]

I want to know how the x38 does with 4 sticks of RAM compared to P35...

i'm currently using an Asus P5K 503 and it really dislikes 4 sticks of over 1000Mhz...

My Commando did not mind 4 sticks at 1200 whatsoever...

BL

 

[SerpentRoyal]

Originally posted by: BLHealthy4life
I want to know how the x38 does with 4 sticks of RAM compared to P35...

i'm currently using an Asus P5K 503 and it really dislikes 4 sticks of over 1000Mhz...

My Commando did not mind 4 sticks at 1200 whatsoever...

BL

Boils down to RAM compatibility with MB/BIOS. I can run up to 602MHz with 1.8V DDR2 800 Kingston ValueRAM.