Gigabyte's GA-X38T-DQ6 is a board we've found great favour in. We've found it very hard to fault the layout if you choose a heatsink that doesn't need to be bolted to the motherboard and even as an engineering sample it's worked flawlessly throughout our testing. There has been some niggles with the Ethernet adapters but the retail boards are working as expected and should be shipping very soon.

It's been a fantastic board to work with even in this early stage, but from the looks of pre-orders, it will be expensive at around £190. Therefore only time will tell if the bundle, stability and extra features due from Intel make it worth the while. Nvidia could command a price premium on the nForce 680i SLI because it had EPP and SLI, but is CrossFire and Intel's Extreme Memory held in the same regard? At least the X38 chipset should provide a diverse range of motherboard options, unlike the nForce 680i SLI, and being an Intel chipset we'd expect it to be far more reliable as well.