MSI jumps the gun with X38 board
 

MSI made a brief introduction of its upcoming X38 based motherboard. This might be among the first board to support Intel X38 high end chipset. This Ultra high end motherboard will be really overclockable and it comes with 4 Phase PWM design. The most interesting is the four PCIe express physical 16X ports all PCI 2.0 ready but electronically two of them are PCIe 16 while two are PCI 4X. This will still be enough to host four PCIe cards at the same time. It also comes with 4 DDR3 memory slots and 2 DDR2 slots so it will make the transition really easy and the board comes with well known X-Fi audio. The board should be ready in September time.

http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?op...18&Ite mid=37

Only four phases? Hmm. Gigabyte offers 6 across all their boards now ever since the underpowered 3-phase issues with the Revision 1 965P-DS3 & related boards.

I do love the idea of DDR2 and DDR3 capability on the same board though, but might have suggested 4xDDR2 and 2xDDR3 instead.

It's neat that they still offer 2 DDR2 slots, that could be a selling point for those with the common 2x1 DDR2 setup once memory prices are rising and Crisis not being the Vista seller it is meant to be.


Will X38 support dividers? (my poor PC5200 memory wouldn't allow much of an overclock otherwise)

I see only 2 sata ports on the board.

it says "circu-pipe" liquid under design

I guess the retail board will look a bit different? (more sata , better cooling etc)

Better image here: http://images.dailytech.com/nimage/5...38_Diamond.jpg

You can see where they will be placing four 90 degree right-angle SATA ports beside the right-angle IDE port.

Rutar, of course it will support dividers. It wouldn't function without them. DDR3 uses dividers similar to DDR2.

yes, but some Intel chipset boards don't have them which can make the memory a limiter to the overclock



those SATA ports would be nice at the side, looks like MSI had a good look at some DFI boards

Gigabyte uses multipliers, but it is the same thing. They don't offer a divider below 1:1, but most boards don't either I believe.

Nooooooooooooooo :(

rather chipset then board limitations.

Haven't seen a P965 or p35 with negative memory divider. Intel 975 for sure and X38 (?), will support ?