Software

When we talked about the accessories bundled with Intel DX38BT mainboard we mentioned that it comes with a full version of Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 game. However, there is quite a lot of cool stuff on the second DVD disk, too. Besides Adobe Acrobat Reader, Dolby Control Center, Windows DirectX 9 and a full set of drivers there are also the following programs and utilities:

• Diskeeper Home Edition;
• DivX for Microsoft Windows;
• Kaspersky antivirus software;
• Kingsoft Antivirus (in Chinese);
• Kingsoft Powerword (in Chinese);
• Norton Antivirus;
• Skype;
• TypePad.

You don’t see so many programs and utilities very often, we should definitely give Intel credit for their generosity. However we were primarily interested in the famous Intel Desktop Control Center utility offering overclocking options. It is listed among the bundled software, but is marked as Internet Download, i.e. in fact it is not there. It is no big deal, because it makes perfect sense to make sure you have the latest program version anyway, and not the one the manufacturer put into the mainboard box a while ago. So, we went to Intel’s official web-site, checked out the available software for Intel DX38BT mainboard, but found no Intel Desktop Control Center – only Intel Desktop Utilities. Could it be what we were looking for?

Intel Desktop Utilities

Intel Desktop Utilities is a set of utilities united under single interface that report the general system info and allow monitoring its major operational statistics. When you launch Intel Desktop Utilities you immediately see the general system info page.

You may get more details on the mainboard, processor, memory and hard drives if you wish.

The next page is called Hardware Monitor and as the name suggests it allows monitoring major system parameters such as voltages, temperatures, fan rotation speeds.

Besides, there is also more detailed info on the processor, power supply, mainboard, HDDs.

Options section offers to set safe intervals, so that you could receive a warning every time the maximum or minimum is surpassed. You can check the event log, change the temperature scale.

All in all, Intel Desktop Utilities is a common monitoring program with pretty standard features. It dates back to early 2007 that is why it recognizes DDR3 SDRAM as DDR2, although detects the frequency and timings correctly. And it certainly wasn’t the program we were looking for.