Excellent board, but excellently overpriced.
X38's are overpriced for the gain in performance. You don't get much. PCIE 2.0 (more watts for 8pin(150w), but you can get that anyway with 2x6pin(75w)) and more bandwidth. Which so far hasn't proven anything. Official support for DDR3 1333 (X48 chipset really only get DDR31600 and 4 X16 lanes), but it's a ddr2 world for most of us thanks to the outrageous pricing of DDR3 at any decent timings. So as far as benches go you get nothing but a single fps. Whats that worth?
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3149&p=6
Many more out there like this. Look at the lowly IP35-PRO for $59 coming in a whole 1fps behind that $260 formula board. From the article you get this:
" However, we have seen significant improvements in memory performance with each succeeding BIOS release so there may be hope for the X38 chipset to distance itself from the P35 in DDR2 performance. Our take is that we might end up seeing a 1%~3% overall difference at most. Probably just enough for the suppliers to start replacing their high-end P35 motherboards with the X38 variants in order to eliminate product overlap. While this is not bad, it is a disappointment to us after the early hype surrounding the chipset. In fact, our A0 X38 silicon based reference board still performs better that the retail boards but not by much now.
We must emphasize that the DFI board is actually more "stable" at 465FSB; also DDR2-1120 is a little easier to reach with more attractively priced memory modules. Had we used the lower 1:1 divider on the Maximus, the scores would have been reversed. In truth, using the 1:1 divider on either board should only reduce scores by around 1-2% maximum, making some of the cheaper DDR2-1000 capable modules a wise purchase for a workstation or gaming PC. ASUS is currently working on a BIOS release that improves overclocking and we will report any performance changes shortly."
I don't see the point for anyone on single cards. Even the maximus extreme (another $100 - That's a $355 board!) gets you nothing but another % tops. Even in overclocking the DFI UT P35 T2R scores within a % of the Maximus Extreme. That's sad. Just as anand said, it's disappointing.
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3190
"t really is no surprise that Intel CPU's are at their very best when teamed with Intel chipsets. Understandably, the release schedule of all the tier-one suppliers includes motherboards in either DDR2 or DDR3 format using either the X38 or the updated (speed binned) X48. While we have always felt that the synthetic performance figures of the X38 in DDR2 form have been lower than expected, the 3D performance gains over more attractively priced P35 chipset is always apparent. In DDR3 format the X38/X48 is the performance choice, and outperforms the DDR2 boards overall in just about every benchmark? well, at least by a few percent. Of course, this slight increase in performance comes at an expensive cost, with DDR3 memory prices being double that of DDR2 - if not more - depending on what speed bin you order."
Translation - Don't bother. "...well, at least by a few percent"...LOL. P35 the chipset of choice for any single card. I'm still waiting for someone to show me SLI/Xfire in any setup that proves they are worthy in even that config. Anyone with a link? For now I agree with cheinonen, $170 can get him 8GB instead of 4GB, a second 500GB drive and $30 in his pocket. Or many other ways to slice it up.
Why do you have an interest in something that is NOT P35? Maybe I've been missing something? Granted if you're trying to set an overclocking record that 2-3% is to die for. But I can't see anything but that currently. The dual/quad vid benchmarks haven't surfaced to prove it's even worth it in that area (correct me if I'm wrong guys, there may be a review out I'm not aware of that compares P35 SLI/Xfire to X38/48 of the same). So why is it interesting to you?