Today we are comparing Intel’s newest member of the 3-series chipset family, codenamed “Bearlake” X38, to the P35 chipset which has been out and about for some time now. Before beginning to review individual X38 motherboards, we have taken the time to compare these two Intel chipsets.
The Intel P35 Express chipset was slated for release in June (2007) though we were lucky enough to have it go on sale here in Australia during May for reasons unknown. This allowed us to bring you some of the first P35 based motherboard reviews to hit the net. Performance wise we found that the new P35 motherboards produced similar performance to that of the existing P965 boards. Although this was a little disappointing as we had hoped that the P35 would make the Core 2 Duo processors even more lethal, the chipset was still a very welcomed edition to the Intel line-up.
This is because the P35 offered more PCI Express lanes, official 1333MHz FSB support for upcoming Intel processors, DDR3 memory support and featured the ICH9 south bridge. That said, the extra PCI Express lanes really only played a small part and for the most part made no difference. The official 1333MHz FSB was nice, but many manufacturers such as ASUS for example, added this support to their older P965 motherboards anyway. Then there was the DDR3 memory support which was pretty much pointless then and still is now.
While Core 2 Duo processors not only fail to utilize half the bandwidth provided by this new high speed memory, DDR3 is so expensive when compared to DDR2 that it is simply not a viable option. Even the south bridge chips were very much alike, as the ICH9 only offered a few more features when compared to the ICH8. For example both supported six SATAII ports, the ICH9 took the USB 2.0 support from ten ports to twelve, while both featured the Intel Matrix RAID technology and Intel HD Audio. Both also featured the Intel Fast Memory Access technology while the Intel Flex Memory Technology was featured exclusively on the new P35 chipset.
Therefore when we first reviewed Intel P35 motherboards from makers such as ASUS and Gigabyte, we were impressed with what they had done with their boards, but at the same time found no need to upgrade from existing P965 motherboards. Today there is still no real incentive for those with P965 motherboards to upgrade to a P35 solution. That said, those looking at building a new system or those upgrading from something pre-P965, should certainly look at getting a P35 based motherboard. However, with the recent arrival of the Intel X38 Express chipset it appears that many are holding off on upgrading, and today we endeavour to find out why...
