From what Ive read the DDR3 ram isn't showing the advantage they had hoped for so Im not ready to run out and buy a new MB just to use it but I must say that embedded Linux is freaking sweet and I think I might build an Intel setup with this MB just to try it out and I need a 2nd gaming rig anyway so theres my excuse for my wife...Honey this ones for you baby...no really.

A few thoughts:

The 2GB DMI bottleneck between the northbridge and southbridge sucks. That's only equivalent to a x4 PCIe 2.0 lane... ah, but the southbridge doesn't support PCIe 2.0.

The limitation to x1 PCIe lanes on the southbridge sucks.
The southbridge is limited to PCIe 1.1. that sucks, too.

Few of your tests seem to max out the bus: 6 disks, Raid-5 in conjunction with high-speed ethernet could be interesting.

Also I'd like to see you guys start to test 10gbps NICs which are coming out from Intel, Myricom, etc -- think it would get some interesting results.

Thanks for your great reviews!

Great mobo reviews as usual. One thing's been bugging me about your testing methods recently:

The gaming performance benchmarks are useless when run at 1024x768. A) No one runs games at that resolution any more. B) If you're going to test at that ridiculous resolution, having the benchmarks statistically even shows they're hitting a bottleneck. It would have been useful to know what that bottleneck was.

Good article. I would never recommend a board over $200 based on any of the features these have, though. If you exclude PCI-E 2.0, they really aren't that special.

For $350 you would have to be getting more then 2.5x the board all in one then a $125 board.

I, for one, don't find Gigabyte's greater support of lower Vcore options to be irrelevant. I realize this is a review of enthusiast boards, but I am much more likely to push the envelope with undervolting than over -- and there are not enough mobo OEMs offering options that way yet.

Thanks for the good review. One thing i found confusing are the comments about the audio scores. Is a low number or a high number "better"? I think a roundup comparison of some of the new integrated audio solutions vs. a couple add-in cards would be very useful.

/end brain dump

X38 = P35 with PCIe 2.0 support.

It is not worth $349 for a X38 board. I doubt PCIe 2.0 will ever be necessary as GPUs are already hitting some walls with power consumption and laws of diminishing returns.

PCIe 1.0 is just starting to be use in non-video cards. There is no reason for extra bandwidth outside of high-end RAID cards.

The Asus name is P5E3, yes? It was P53E at one point and P5NE in the conclusion. Just typo or what?

Heh, I just built a machine that's powered by a good 965 board so I won't be performing any major upgrades anytime soon. The X38 looks like a good chipset but I wonder how will the X48 improve on it aside from support for faster DDR3? Intel has already confirmed it's release for early next year and they may even release a tweaked version of the X38.

Seems to me that it's best to go with a P35-powered board for now.

Oh, I forget to mention that X38 is literately the next 925X.

A soild chipset that started out in very expensive boards. They were rendered obsolete by socket and VRM changes by the time boards became affordable.

It's a nice review, Geoff. I would have liked to have seen more comparison of memory performance for DDR2-800 vs. DDR2-1066 vs. DDR3-1066 vs. DDR3-1333.

Intro
Conclusion
comment. Done!

First. I guess I should read the article now.

/I am annoying right now.

Edit:

Seems we have a cost trifecta here:
X38 mobo price premium
DDR3 price premium
higher overall power consumption vs the p35 w/DDR2

Considering the relatively tiny gains, I can't recommend an X38/DDR3 upgrade path.

I'm a little confused by this quote on the first page:

"It's no surprise, then, that gen-two PCIe lanes offer 1GB/s of bandwidth—double that of their PCIe 1.1 predecessors."

My understanding is that:

a PCIe 2.0 (x1) link is capable of 5 Gbits/sec in both directions, simultaneously, (before overhead is subtracted). After overhead, you get perhaps 4Gbits/second/link (= 500 MBytes/second/link) in both directions, simultaneously.

Are you adding both directions to get 1GByte/second? Or perhaps, is what you're calling a "lane" different from a link? Thanks.

Great article as always. I liked the peripheral I/O comparison.

Typo page 5: "...clumsy ribbon cables every again".

would it be unusual to say that the most interesting thing that i found about the P5E3 @n is that the I/O shield doesn't have those annoying bendable tabs?

Reading it, I was given cause to wonder if firewire 800 works right in Vista.