Verdict: Excellent layout and interesting features - shame about the speed.
Oddly, this is only the fifth Intel X38 board we've tested - we say odd, as Intel is the current choice of CPU and the X38 is quite amenable to overclocking. However, Intel quickly superseded the X38, and its apparently poxy 1,333MHz FSB support, with the X48, which supports a 1,600MHz FSB for Penryn Core 2 CPUs. That the X38 is no longer top dog in Intel's chipset line-up means that it's more reasonably priced - this Abit X38 board comes in at £40 less than the cheapest X38 board of the past few months.
Don't worry about this board being a cheap and nasty waste of a PCB though - far from it, it's still packed with goodies. For example, Abit has designed a new type of VRM circuit to help with overclocking. With every X38 board we've seen proving to be a capable overclocker, and this board only costing £30 more than the Asus P5K Premium WiFi-AP, we were looking forward to a treat.
The X38 chipset has three advantages over the P35-based P5K: PCI-E 2.0 support; full-speed, two-card CrossFire; and XMP memory compatibility. The latter can be dismissed in this case, as the IX38 QuadGT is a DDR2 board and only DDR3 memory has XMP. Abit has done well to ignore DDR3 memory, as DDR2 offers plenty of performance for a much lower price. With four DIMM sockets, the QuadGT can support up to 8GB of memory.
Support for PCI-E 2.0 is welcome, since all new graphics cards use the new bus and it offers twice the bandwidth of conventional PCI-E 1.1 per physical lane. While it's impossible to prove conclusively how much difference this makes (you'd have to test it against a PCI-E 1.1 chipset, which would be of an older design and likely to hinder performance), you're as well having PCI-E 2.0 support than not, if all other factors are equal. The X38 has more PCI-E lanes available than the P35 too, so two of the three 16x graphics slots have 16 PCI-E 2.0 lanes, while the third has only four. A P35 can only provide four PCI-E 1.1 lanes for its secondary graphics slot after allocating 16 lanes to its primary slot.
As well as the handy extras of the chipset, the QuadGT looks as though it's capable of good things. The moody blue PCB has an obsessively neat layout, with no sign of oddly shaped heatpipes or silly heatsinks that look like aliens. The compactness of the new 'digital' VRMs means there's plenty of space around the CPU socket for fitting a large heatsink. Elsewhere, both the single EIDE and six S-ATA sockets are situated on the edge of the motherboard, and lie parallel to the board to keep the cabling neat. This also ensures that the sockets won't be obstructed by a large graphics card.
Don't let the meticulous neatness fool you into thinking that the QuadGT is devoid of interesting additions, though.There are useful power and reset buttons tucked neatly in one corner, with the clear CMOS jumper nearby. This area also accommodates an LCD POST readout, which could help identify a fault. There's even a CMOS reset button on the rear I/O block should an apparently good overclock go tits up after you've built your PC.
The expansion slots are also sensibly arranged. If you fancy using two dual-height cards, you'll still have access to the third full-length PCI-E slotand the second of the two PCI slots. Above the primary graphics slot is a 1x PCI-E slot.
With the 24-pin and 8-pin power connectors well out of the way, and the USB headers neatly placed too, only the odd placement of the FireWire header towards the middle of the board gives any cause for concern. Even so, there's a FireWire port on the rear I/O block, so it's a trifling worry. Nearby is both digital S/PDIF in and out, and two eSATA ports.
Performance
When we first booted up the QuadGT, it defaulted to a 340MHz FSB (1,360MHz effective) rather than the official 333MHz (1,333MHz effective). This meant that we had a 2.725GHz Core 2 Duo E6750, rather than a 2.66GHz CPU. As this is the QuadGT's default, and with every Core 2 CPU easily capable of such a minuscule overclock without any extra voltage, we didn't adjust the overclock for the stock speed tests.
Surprisingly though, the board returned lower stock benchmark results than those of the Elite-listed Asus P5K Premium WiFi-AP, which doesn't overclock the CPU by default. The QuadGT's overall score of 909 compares badly to the 985 of the Asus . The multitasking score really lets down the QuadGT - 748 is very slow and indicates that something in the latest (at the time of writing) Revision 11 BIOS isn't right. However, this is a common problem, and not specific to Abit.
Overclocking was a much more rewarding experience. Slightly increasing the FSB voltage, and increasing the CPU voltage to 1.525V allowed us to push our CPU to its limit of 3.66GHz, with an FSB of 458MHz (1,832 effective). This boosted the GIMP and video encoding scores to a very respectable 1,306 and 1,325 respectively, which is almost equal to the scores of the Asus. However, the multitasking test was again slow, dragging the overall score down to 1,164. The Asus P5K Premium WiFi-AP scores 1,307 overall, as it doesn't make a meal of the multitasking test.
Dropping the CPU multiplier allowed us to push the QuadGT's FSB speed to an impressive 520MHz. However, the Asus hit a stellar 540MHz maximum FSB. The Asus P5K Premium WiFi-AP also costs around £110, £30 less than this motherboard, and has WiFi built in.
Conclusion
The Quad GT, with its new digital VRMs, great layout and high FSB speeds, gets most things right for an overclockers' motherboard. The use of an X38 chipset provides PCI-E 2.0 support, with 16 lanes supplied to two of the three graphics slots for full-speed CrossFire. However, the cheaper, P35-based Asus P5K Premium WiFi-AP forgoes these less tangible benefits in favour of on-board WiFi. Had all other aspects been equal, it might have been a tough call to decide which one to buy - PCI-E 2.0 support but no WiFi, or vice versa? However, the poor performance of the Abit IX38 QuadGT makes the Asus P5K Premium WiFi-AP the clear choice.
