Intel DX38BT - Motherboard

Product Price : Rs. 10,000

The Intel DX38BT (Bonetrail) motherboard is supposed to replace the BadAxe 2 D975XBX as Intel’s top of the line enthusiast motherboard. Unfortunately, the board is obsolete at launch, since it does not support a 1600 Mhz Front Side Bus, thereby ruling out Intel’s fastest processor — the QX9770. However, let’s examine the things the board does offer. PCI Express 2.0 is supported, and Intel has done away with all legacy ports, including the floppy drive and PS/2 connectors. Eight USB ports on the back panel along with four on the board take care of peripheral connectivity. Six SATA ports and two eSATA ports mean that you can hook up a whole lot of storage. This board only supports DDR-3 memory, which is a bit of a shame. Gigabit LAN and a single FireWire 400 port are par for the course.

The board performed quitewell, scoring exactly 100 on our WorldBench tests. We tested it with an Intel Quad Core Q6600 and 4 GB of DDR-3 RAM. A PCMark score of 8800 meant that the board is not holding back the CPU. Intel also makes it easy to overclock with BIOS options for CPU and memory clock speeds and voltages. You can also use Intel’s Desktop Control Center to tinker about without having to reboot. The BIOS suffers from a little bit of lag, which surprised us.

Intel is poised to launch the X48 chipset, which will add support for 1600MHz and further enhance overclocking. We’d suggest holding off for a month or so to see what Intel serves up next.

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