Tweaktown just published their Intel P35 "Bearlake" Chipset Performance Preview. Bearlake-X will be known as the X38 chipset and it will be Intel's premium high-end chipset designed to replace the 975X chipset. The main advantage of this chipset is that it features two full-speed PCI Express x16 slots for Dual Graphics and they will be new version 2.0 slots supporting up to 5Gbps bandwidth. Here's a bit:

Intel has put a lot of work into this chipset by the design of it, and with more on the way we can only hope things do get even better. Intel is looking like they are setting themselves up for a great run for the remainder of 2007 and into next year with their upcoming Yorkfield and Wolfdale processors. And with massive price drops on the horizon for upcoming Intel processors since all Dual Core processors will become mainstream parts making room for Quad Core as premium high-end, it's only going to mean good things for Intel. For instance, the E6850 processor will debut with a street price around $266 USD which is around 75% cheaper than what the X6800 was selling for and you're getting a processor platform which is able to perform faster.

One thing that was very limited in this silicon revision was its overclocking. By default the motherboard supports 333MHz FSB but we only managed to get it to 350MHz and this wasn't 100% stable. This wasn't anything to do with the board itself, as our board was supplied with plenty of overclocking tweaks, just that the chipset is of first silicon and not ready for full release yet. As we said, the P35 is based on 65nm process technology and once it's fully ready for public consumption, we expect it to perform as least as well as Intel P965 in FSB overclocking.