Introduction

Intel's Core 2 portfolio keeps growing and growing. Not only does Core 2 now have its second incarnation with the Penryn based architecture that packs more in by reducing power and temperatures whilst offering even more performance per MHz, but it has a huge array of chipsets to run on as well with 90% of them coming from Intel alone. Intel's P35 chipset started the big push into the Core 2 market with P965 just showing what potential was lurking for the platform. P35 gave us DDR2 and DDR3 memory support on a single chip along with Crossfire support and all the latest features on the ICH9 family Southbridge.

X38 has now come out along with its bigger brother, the X48 targeted at the extreme user wanting every last drop of overclocking available to them; but for the more money conscious users who don't want to sacrifice performance or functionality, the X38 chipset is the way to go. Since the X48 is simply an X38 with improved clock speed support and official support for 1600MHz FSB CPU's, the X38 shares its full feature set such as dual memory support (DDR2 and DDR3 memory controllers), PCI Express 2.0 support and full speed Crossfire.

Today we have a new board from Foxconn who are always trying to push further into the motherboard sector. If you want to get ahead today, you have to be creative or reduce costs as much as possible without sacrificing features. We have on hand the new Digital Life series Foxconn X38A board; how does it stack up? Come and see.