Intel hasn't officially released the successor to its range-topping i975X chipset. That fact seems to have been conveniently ignored by motherboard partners when outfitting their respective stands a day before COMPUTEX 2007 officially starts.

Take GIGABYTE as an example. Its stand is littered with Bearlake motherboards. The ones that caught our attention were the X38 series, designed as a high-end chipset to complement Intel's upcoming Penryn CPUs. X38 will feature dual x16 PCIe electrical and PCIe 2.0 support for starters.

[advert]There doesn't appear to be a great deal of difference between the GA-X38-DQ6 (very top) and GA-X38T-DQ6 (above). Both feature the X38 MCH and ICH9R southbridge. However, on closer inspection, the non-T model will support ubiquitous DDR2, whilst the 'T' variant will provide out-of-the-box DDR3-1600 compatibility for increased bandwidth and performance.

We guess that the transition to DDR3 will be slow, and manufacturers, rightly, don't want to get burned by jumping straight on over to expensive DDR3 for their entire catalogue.

No word on pricing or availability. GIGABYTE's specification, though, did allude to dual Gigabit LAN with teaming. I'm sure NVIDIA will be happy.