Anandtech has a review of the Asus X38 chipset board http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3098&p=1 . Looks to be a very high end board that runs about as stable as the P5K (very stable) and gets slightly better results with an early BIOS. It has the same SB as the P5K and the BIOS looks very similar as well. Bottomline it seems to be a slight improvement over the P35 but nothing to trade up for, especially considering the current price of DDR3 as compared to DDR2.

In other news, Nehalem is taped out and running windows. That ain't a good thing for AMD.

Yeah you're right Merc, I've seen some reviews of the X38 and it is only a marginal improvement over the p35, I'll keep going with my P5K for now.
When DDR3 becomes affordable, I may go down that route, but I'm happy for now..
Nehalem is going to be the next big thing...Maybe even spell the end for AMD

Definite improvement in memory speed but not worth the investment IMHO. Penryn at 45nm may be the next big thing for our boards. In '08 the world chnages again when Intel goes to a new socket and Nehalem hits the market. Some wil have the memory controller on board and others will use the chipset. Late '08 I believe.

EDIT: The Inqurier is whispering that the Nehalem may run on the P35 chipset in 775 sockets.

Tom's did a 21 page review on the X38 here http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/09/26/int...pset/index.html

Summary:
It is a forward looking chip with PCIe 2.0 (that no vid-card is capable of taking advantage of), and finally two full 16x lanes of PCIe for graphics as well as XMP (like SLI RAM) and Penryn capable. Performance-wise it has no advantages over the P35 and THG could only get to 485MHz on the FSB. Top it off with a starting price of $285 and all indicators say go P35 and skip X38 unless you really want the most out of your Crossfire cards.