14 DAY TRIAL // The Intel X38 desktop performance aimed chipset is coming closer to its official launch date and mainboard manufacturing companies are rushing in presenting their product lines. The biggest fuzz and buzz is, of course, about mainboards designed and manufactured by the first tier producers, as they are offering the best possible performance and lots of interesting features, often above the basic functionality required.
MSI just announced another top of the line mainboard that is expected to be able to compete directly against the state of the art ''Republic of Gamers'' motherboard designed and manufactured by Asus. Just like the Asus made mainboard, the HydroGenX38, as is called the new top offering from MSI, comes equipped with a water cooling solution that should prove adequate to maintain the hot Intel X38 chipset at reasonable operating temperatures. Apart from the northbridge, the Watercool.de manufactured cooling system also covers the southbridge and the CPU power circuits, so the HydroGenX38 will enjoy an overall cooler environment than most air cooled offerings.
The new MSI mainboard will arrive on the market in two varieties, both as a DDR3 compatible mainboard and as a combo unit offering support for DDR2 and DDR3 random access memory modules. Unfortunately, the combo model cannot handle both memory types at once, so users will have to decide between them.
Apart from the different memory modules that are supported, the two HydroGenX38 variants are sporting identical features as they come with two PCI Express 2.0 compatible x16 slots, seven Serial ATA II ports for hard disk drives and optical units and two Ethernet ports. For users that are employing external storage devices, the MSI HydroGenX38 also features two eSATA ports and for legacy storage devices an IDE port is also present. On the connectivity side, users going for this top of the line mainboard will have a wide range of possibilities, as the MSI offering comes equipped with no less than 8 high speed USB 2.0 ports.
While the launch date is not yet known, the DDR3 capable only MSI HydroGenX38 mainboard is expected to come with a price tag of 379 Euro, that clearly puts it in the upper part of the motherboards' spectrum.