Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6

BIOS:

The Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6 offers a Quad BIOS that includes the DualBIOS and Express BIOS Rescue Technology. While this offering isn't like the ASUS Express Gate, it still is nice that Gigabyte is providing other BIOS-level innovations.

Performance:

As we are publishing this prior to the October 10 launch date and using an early BIOS, we hadn't done any overclocking with this X38-DQ6 motherboard. However, the Intel X38 Chipset has removed the overspeed protection to offer unleashed overclocking performance. The other hardware we had used included an Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 processor, 2GB OCZ Flex XLC DDR2-800 memory, ASUS GeForce 8600GT 512MB graphics card, and a Seagate 200GB hard drive. Like the Intel P35 Chipset, Intel's X38 worked great with Linux and we ran into no compatibility problems with either Ubuntu 7.04 or Fedora 7. The network, audio, and other onboard components had worked "out of the box". However, Sun's Check Tool 1.3 had failed to properly run on the X38.

The Linux benchmarks we had run on the X38-DQ6 included Enemy Territory, Quake 4, LAME encoding, timed disk reads, and Gzip compression. During the benchmarking process we had used Fedora 7 with the Linux 2.6.22.9 kernel and NVIDIA 100.14.19 display driver. For comparison, we had benchmarked the P35-backed ASUS Blitz Extreme with the same hardware but using 2GB of OCZ Gold DDR3-1333 memory.