Which is better P35 or X38
I've been doing some research and getting some mixed signals as to which is better for OC and overall better performance. From what I've researched here and elsewhere the P35 and X38 offer comparable OC'ing capabilities. The only real difference I found between the P35 and X38 is that X38 offers PCI Express 2.0 and dual PCIe 16x slots, that's it. While the P35 offers 8x/8x. Here is one thread discussing dual 16x difference between the 2. Here you can read a about it.
But that still leaves the burning question, "which is better P35 or X38?" There are still people who prefer only 1 video card so we want to know if the X38 is better then the P35. We know the P35 and X38 offers far better OC capabilities but that's really no answer between the 2. So we look to Legion Hardware which created a article to answer this question.
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The X38 produced just 1.8% more memory bandwidth in SiSoft XII when compared to the P35 chipset. Similar performance margins were also witnessed in EVEREST and MemTach, which indicates that the X38 memory performance is only slightly improved. Keep in mind that we are using a 3.0GHz Core 2 Duo processor (E6850) with 1333MHz DDR3 memory. Therefore both chipsets were tested using the updated 1333MHz front side bus.
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When clocked at the same frequency the X38 chipset provides exactly the same processor performance as the P35 chipset.
In reference to SPI, Everest and Sandra XIII results.
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Now for the all important gaming performance that we have selected Prey, Company of Heroes and Quake Wars as the test subjects for. These games were handpicked because they are influenced not only by GPU performance, but also CPU and RAM performance. Therefore they are good games to measure overall system performance with; a bad example would be F.E.A.R! As you can see, the X38 was really no faster than the P35 chipset when it came time to game. The only real performance difference was seen in Prey at 1920x1200, where the X38 was seen to be around 6fps faster.
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Again, although Intel did claim that the X38 was a much better overclocker, we failed to prove this when testing with the new ASUS P5E3 Deluxe motherboard. The P5K3 Deluxe was just as impressive and both boards managed a 100% stable overclock of 3.64GHz using the Thermalright Ultra-120 heatsink.
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Here are some results using some X38 MBs and P35. As you can see, I can't see a decisive winner here. I am sure there are other websites that have written a good comparison between the P35 and X38. However, it's not as cut and dry which one is better.
Now I am not sure about quad core performance but as you can see, I can't seem to find where X38 takes a decisive win over P35 from the few links I've posted so far. Can anyone offer any input on this situation? IE: which is better in performance and OC-ability the P35 or X38?
