Verdict: The cheapest X38 board around, and it's rather good.
The Intel X38 chipset at the heart of this motherboard is billed as having all the features that gamers are supposed to like: big overclocks, PCI-E 2.0 and high-speed graphics slots for two cards (although only CrossFire is supported). As a premium chipset, you might expect it to have a hefty price tag, but Gigabyte has incorporated the X38 into a board that costs a very reasonable £111. Given that it uses DDR2 memory as well, this board could form the basis of a cheap but fast PC.
The X38-DS4's cooling system looks striking. There's a block of copper to cool the Northbridge, which is attached to the VRM heatsink by a heatpipe. This amount of cooling is a healthy statement of intent: this board looks as if it should easily handle a heavy overclock. The cooling setup is also neatly arranged - the Southbridge heatsink won't clash with a long graphics card, and the Northbridge and VRM heatsinks didn't interfere with our bulky Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro CPU cooler. The large Northbridge heatsink becomes rather hot, though, so your case will need good airflow to keep it cool.
The overall layout of the X38-DS4 is excellent, with all the connectors pushed to the edges of the motherboard. From the block of four S-ATA ports (which you should use before reverting to the extra pair of S-ATA ports placed close by) to the two power connectors to the fan headers, everything is neatly positioned. With this board in your case, there's little excuse for a messy PC. The layout of the expansion slots is also sensible; even with two dual-slot cards in CrossFire (remember that SLI isn't supported), one of the two PCI slots and two of the 1x PCI-E slots will be free. If you use a single dual-slot card, both PCI slots will be free and as far away from your furnace-like graphics card as possible. The third 1x PCI-E slot, which is located above the primary graphics slot, is for short cards only (such as WiFi cards), as the Northbridge will be too close to the PCB of a longer card and could cause overheating issues.
Gigabyte has festooned the X38-DS4 with all the extras you could need. There's a FireWire controller (usually the first chip to be removed when cutting costs), and Gigabyte has used a Gigabyte-branded I/O controller to add the previously mentioned extra pair of S-ATA 2 ports and an EIDE connector.
With the excellent layout and all the extras, we hoped that performance and overclockability hadn't been compromised in order to achieve the low price of the X38-DS4. At stock speeds, the Gimp and Handbrake tests were close to the 1,000 points we'd expect, and even the 850 scored in the multitasking test isn't terrible. Supreme Commander was a little slow, delivering a minimum of 6fps. However, the average of 43fps shows that the X38-DS4 isn't a limiting factor in gaming performance.
While the board looks like it's a good overclocker, the BIOS has awkward voltage menus for the RAM and FSB. These menus show only incremental increases in voltage rather than the absolute values we prefer. Therefore, you have to remember that the stock voltage of DDR2 is 1.8V, so RAM rated at 2.2V will need a 0.4V overvolt, for example. Oddly, the CPU and Southbridge voltages are listed as absolute values.
Overvoltage oddities aside, the BIOS is intuitive and easy to handle. With 1.525V coursing through our Core 2 Duo E6750 test chip, we only needed to raise the FSB to 458MHz to achieve its air-cooled maximum frequency of 3.66GHz. The fact that we didn't need to touch the FSB or Northbridge voltage shows that the X38-DS4 is a competent overclocker. With the CPU at 3.66GHz, we saw more than a 30 per cent increase in the benchmark results, with the image editing test increasing to 1,330 and the video encoding test rising to 1,362. The multitasking test didn't improve by much, but the increase to 995 still contributes to a reasonably high overall score of 1,229. Supreme Commander saw around a 10 per cent rise in its average frame rate. By dropping the multiplier of our CPU, we were able to push the FSB up to 525MHz.
Conclusion
While the Asus P5K Premium WiFi-AP, with its stock speed score of 985, overclocked score of 1,307 and maximum FSB of 540MHz, might be faster than the X38-DS4, its Intel P35 chipset lacks PCI-E 2.0 compatibility and dual 16x graphics slots.
The P5K Premium WiFi-AP is slightly cheaper, and has on-board WiFi.
The X38-DS4 is nevertheless a keenly priced motherboard that doesn't skimp on the extras. Its excellent layout, such as leaving a PCI and 1x PCI-E slot free even if you use two dual-slot CrossFire cards, and the neat positioning of power connectors and headers, makes it easy to install neatly. The robust overclocking also means that your PC will run fast. If you're looking for a good, inexpensive CrossFire motherboard board, then the X38-DS4 is it.
