Preview: MSI X38 Diamond (Intel X38)
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Introduction
MSI Polishes Another Diamond with the Intel X38
After our brief run in with Foxconn's X38A, MSI sent us their upcoming flagship motherboard, the MSI X38 Diamond. With the official launch date of the Intel X38 just around the corner, we were a little surprised that MSI sent us an early engineering sample of the board, which we last saw ready at this year's Computex Taipei tradeshow. However, the X38 Diamond looked like one of the more interesting X38 motherboard implementations to appear and we're sure that you'd love to see what MSI is cooking up close and personal.
The MSI X38 Diamond builds upon the MSI P35 Diamond (Read the review here), using the same formula as before, bundling high end Creative X-Fi audio and VoIP solutions into the board as well as a new Circu-Pipe cooler design. Looking at the board itself, it looks like MSI has beefed up some of the motherboard components as well, but what was most interesting is that the X38 Diamond features four PCIe x16 slots. The X38 chipset is supposed to support dual full speed x16 natively, so could this be MSI's attempt to split the rails to get four graphics lanes for quad GPU setups? We spied an IDT PCIe controller onboard, which looks like a similar approach to the ASUS Blitz series of boards. MSI claims that the board operates at x16/x16/x4/x4. You might also have noticed that our sample has six DIMM slots with a hybrid setup, but MSI has confirmed that the X38 Diamond retail board will only come with four DDR3 memory slots.
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