14 DAY TRIAL // The next generation of Intel chipsets, the X38, will be integrated in many motherboards designed for the Intel platform. Among the computer hardware manufacturers that expressed an interest in this chipset is MSI, a first tier manufacturer and vendor. Traditionally, MSI's Diamond line of motherboards is seen as the top of the line of what the company has to offer. The next X38 Diamond product makes no exception from this rule.
MSI plans the X38 Diamond as a really high end product, equipped with the Circu-Pipe cooling system and a water cooled model is expected as well. The cooling system is still in the design and development phase, so only a handful of details are available at the moment. According to the computer hardware news site custompc, which cited sources from MSI, the water cooling system to be employed on the X38 Diamond is very close to the one used by Asus on its Blitz Extreme motherboards.
This means that users will benefit from the cooling of the VRM circuits as well, allowing for a better overclock capability without the risk of overheating the motherboard's powering circuits. The first Circu-Pipe water cooled system was presented by MSI on its P35 Platinum motherboard. That setup comes with two heatpipes that connect to the Northbridge cooler and a third pipe that is connected to the VRM cooler. In addition to the Circu-Pipe cooling system, the X38 Diamond mainboard will also feature support for both DDR2 and DDR3 memory modules on the same board. There will be four DDR3 memory slots and two slots designed for DDR2 memory and a switch card. In an effort to support as much as possible the new video technologies, MSI decided to integrate four full-size 16x PCI-E slots. This will allow two graphics cards to use 16 communications lanes each and another two video cards to run on four lanes each.
According to MSI, this PCI-Express setup will allow users to employ the CrossFire X16 and 'Triple card' setups in the future. On the audio site, the X38 Diamonf mainboard comes with an integrated Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme audio card. The new MSI card intended to be top of the line for the Intel X38 chipset will feature some interesting components, but it is very unlikely that it will come at a low or even medium price.