Introduction:



We all know DFI as the enthusiast-minded company that always tries to get the most out of their boards, overclocking-wise. By combining stable PWM areas and an insane amount of bios options and you have an overclockers dream. Madshrimps reviewers have seen many DFI motherboards over the years and none have been a disappointing so far. (I can only remember one issue: the DFI P965-s not being able to cope with ln² cooled processors) So you probably wouldn't blame us for having high hopes about this one.

It has been a while since we published our P35 motherboard round-up, so it was time to have a look at the changes on the chipset market. As most of you already know, the Intel P35 chipset blew fresh air through the overclocking community as the performance was outstanding and the chipset had no problem to reach 600+ Mhz front side bus. The only thing we really missed was two X16 PCIe lanes to fully benefit from the extra bandwidth provided when inserting another ATI video card in CrossFire configuration.



Now, after reading more about the differences between the X38 and P35 chipsets on the Intel homepage and looking at the comparison between the two, I can only say that the only drastic difference is the extra x16 PCI-E lane. In fact, the X38 is just a higher-binned P35 chipset and should guarantee better overclocks and tighter Northbridge latency straps. That's all, nothing more, nothing less; however it's still interesting to have a look at the actual differences between the X38 and P35 performance wise. In fact, to be completely honest with you, since the release of the i955 chipset, every new chipset has been based on the previous one, so we could say that the X38 (and P35) is just a tuned i955 chipset. The difference, however, are very big and thanks to the Intel engineers we now have much faster chipsets.



Before we continue, a quick word about the shop that made this review possible: Alternate Belgium. Alternate used to be a Germany-only webshop, but it has expanded over Western-Europe and since a few months, there have a brick and mortar store in Belgium as well. As they insist on good service, Alternate uses a large stock which you can order online for quick turnaround. (According to the information on the website, you receive your products the next day if ordered online before 15h00!). For our Belgian readers, please visit www.alternate.be in order to find out more about Alternate Belgium.

Let's take a look at the motherboard ->