It looks as if Asus isn't the only motherboard manufacturer working on a watercooling solution for its X38 boards as we spotted the picture blow of MSI's new HydroGen X38 board. To be honest, it's the same X38 Diamond board as we've shown you pictures of before, but with a new watercooling solution which looks quite interesting. This is also unlikely to be a final version of the board, as MSI decided against having DDR2 on its X38 boards due to the performance issues it caused.

 

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Besides, it looks as if there's something missing on the watercooling end as well, since you can see two big holes, one in each end. This is suggesting to us that the traditional heatpipe is empty in this case and that the water from your watercooling kit will be running through the copper pipe instead. This seems like a very strange setup and it's the first time we've encountered something like this.

The size of the cooler on the ICH9R is also strange, since this runs relatively cool in comparison to the X38 chipset which seems to have been fitted with a rather tiny cooler. This is a reason for concern in case the water pump would fail on your watercooling setup, as the heatsink doesn't seem to be able to cope with the heat generated by the X38 chipset.

Still, it will be interesting to see what MSI is actually planning here and the board is apparently meant to be out before the end of the month and it should cost around AU$595 which seems quite steep considering that all MSI has done is to add a watercooling setup to an existing board.

You can find some additional information over at Hardwareluxx , but the site is in German so be pre-warned