ASUS P5E3 Deluxe WiFi-AP @n motherboard Review

The biggest improvement to be found in X38 over i975X is in the number of PCI Express lanes available to the chipset, touting a total of thirty-two lanes compared to just twenty in its predecessor. This gives X38 the ability to offer two 16x PCI Express for Graphics slots, both of which can offer their full bandwidth when used in an ATI CrossFire configuration, in comparison to i975X, which dropped from a single 16-lane slot to two eight-lane supporting slots in a multi-GPU configuration. To top even that, the PCI Express 16x slots present on X38 motherboards are PCI Express 2.0 compared to the older 1.1 specification seen on other motherboards - This doubles the maximum bandwidth available from 2.5GT/s (Gigatransfers per second) up to 5Gbps, giving a single PCI Express 16x slot around 16Gbps of bandwidth (8Gbps each way), as well as offering the potential to feed more power to the graphics board via the PCI Express slot and dynamic speed link control. Needless to say, PCI Express 2.0 is compatible with PCI Express 1.1 graphics boards, so there shouldn't be any backwards compatibility nightmares.