With the arrival of the X38 chipset, enthusiast can look forward to replacing motherboards with the Intel 975X chipset, which had a number of heating and power issues. The new chipset bears a higher front side bus (FSB) than its predecessor, and has many new important improvements such as the PCI Express 2.0 and the support for DDR3 technology.
The X38 was designed for the enthusiast/overclocker’s population, and so having an abundant supply of tool is nearly a must. We explored the motherboard box to find out four SATA cables, an IDE and floppy cable, three Molex-SATA power cables, an eSATA cable and an IEEE 1394 external module. The X38 chipset has native Crossfire support, hence it would only be right if Crossfire ribbons were provided, which MSI has kindly included. Also, we see the X-FI Xtreme Audio and the SkyTel solution that we saw in the P35 Diamond’s bundle as well. For those of you who don’t already know, the SkyTel solutions allows you to connect your normal phone to the PC and turn them into a VOIP phone.
The Circu-Pipe design seem to be MSI’s number one cooling solution. However, this current one is a little different from the one we saw on earlier MSI boards. The circuit connects the northbridge, southbridge and the IDT (Integrated Device Technology) chip. Previously, the heatsink over the southbridge was quite high, which didn’t allow wider graphics cards to be installed. This time, MSI has gone with a flatter copper block and they’ve positioned it further away from the first PCIe x16 slot. The Circu-Pipe solution did manage to keep the board cool at around 30°C to 40°C. All the ports were situated at accessible locations so no issues there. With the new X38 chipset, two graphics cards can run at full potential simultaneously. MSI has spaced out the first two PCIe x16 slots to cater to larger graphics card. However, the PCIe x1 slots will probably be blocked by bigger cards. The last two PCIe x16 slots only use four lanes, hence the different coloration. Even with the PCIe x1 slot blocked, you can still install the X-FI Xtreme Audio card in one of the last two PCIe slots. Aside from those, MSI has put in a LED display as well as power and reset buttons, which are really useful when doing some overclocking.
Our testing was done using the following benchmark equipment - an Intel core 2 Extreme X6800 processor, a pair of 1GB XMS3 DDR3-1333 RAM from Corsair, and an NX8800HTS with compliments from MSI. The X38 Diamond scored 7,536 on CPU, 5,998 on memory, 11,706 on graphics, and 5,474 on HDD, giving an average PCMark score of 8,092.
Most boards come with some notable flaws but we haven’t found any on the X38 Diamond. Sure the price is a bit steep, but you get a large assortments of features and tools at your disposable. Hook up Crossfire rig and you’ll be having a ball when gaming.
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