Intel chipsets come in different flavors. For Penryn 45 Nanometers processors there's the X38 set high-end chipset and the P35 mid-range set. The X38 chipset comes with a ICH9R southbridge.
You'll find it hard to justify the purchase of a X38 board over a P35 board, the features/price difference is in favor of P35 boards but for the enthusiast is this board a very nice one. Size: ATX form factor, 30.5cm * 24.4cm.
Most noticeable feature is the 2* PCIe*16, PCI-Express 2.0 expansion slots. These offer support for ATI Crossfire bridging, no nVidia SLI. The PCIe 2.0 aspect is about as usefull as there aren't many cards using that technology yet atm, afaik.
My choice was a board for DDR2 RAM but setups for DDR3 are available too. There are 4 slots available for a total of 8GB RAM. Dual channel is supported (tested), quad channel isn't listed in the specs.
The board excels on the level of connectivity, see the LSPCI output for an idea. If it has a plug, you can hook it up, so some care is needed when installing a system: The board has a good lay-out and I've found most connectors easy accessible. I don't use every connector but if I would I'd end up with a spaghetti of cables in my PC case but that's not the fault of this board, it's the result of having so many possibilities. The power slot and a fan connector can be hard to reach when inside the PC case due to the heatpipe on the board, especially if you have a large sink installed on the CPU.
Between the on-board heatsink and a CPU sink can be little room making it potentially difficult to place the CPU sink if the pin of the CPU sink, connecting the sink with the board, doesn't fall in place immediately.
I haven't tried the overclocking features yet, the manual lists:
Voltage adjustments: CPU, DDR2, PCIe, FSB, (G)MCH
Frequency adjustments: CPU, DDR2 PCIe*16
It has an Award BIOS and it's supposed to be excellent for OC ("MB Intelligent Tweaker" addition to ordinary BIOS functions). Dual BIOS means there's a fall back BIOS in case you've tweaked the other BIOS too far (untested).
Packaging is OK, the board comes with at least a manual and installation guides, a driver/utility disk (Windows), IDE cable, floppy cable, 4 SATA (2) cables, 2 SATA (2) brackets (external SATA slots), backplate.
The manual contains a description of the board with lay-out, adequate installation instructions (including every type of connection), a complete description of the BIOS options, driver installation instructions, utility and BIOS update instructions, SATA configuration instructions with instructions for setting up RAID (under WinXP/Vista) , configuring audio, troubleshooting/FAQ.
Diagrams, B/W photographs and screenshots throughout the entire manual where appropriate.
Pictures of the package can be found here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/09/26/intel_x38_chipset/page9.html
I've given this motherboard a 10 because I haven't found a fault with it. Packaging OK and abundant, installation was easy, very solid and well designed board, the manual is sufficient, the BIOS easily adjustable and my system hasn't let me down in the past 2 months with a few distros tried (32 & 64bit).
The board is "Certified for Microsoft VISTA™ systems" but that would be a waste of an excellent motherboard, it's perfectly capable of running a Linux based system.
Edit: the price was 177 Euro, roughly $260
