The chipset North Bridge is cooled with a large aluminum heatsink.

There is a plastic bracket attaches to the board and the heatsink sits on top of it. A special metal plate at the bottom of the PCB ensures sturdiness of this construction.

Intel X38 Express chipset consumes more power and certainly dissipates more heat than its predecessors that is why it would be better to install a fan on top of the heatsink even when the system runs in its nominal mode. It is not for nothing that Intel DX38BT mainboards comes with the special fan retention for that.

The expansion slots including two blue PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots, one black PCI Express 1.0a x16 slot working at PCI-E x4 and two PCI slots are located in the lower part of the mainboard PCB. The slots are very close to one another. There is a sufficient gap only between the blue PCI Express x16 slots, so that a graphics card with a massive cooling system installed into the first one doesn’t block other expansion slots.

The distance from the first PCI Express x16 slot and the North Bridge chipset heatsink may seem pretty small, however, it should be enough for most graphics card cooling systems. Even some VGA coolers like the ones from Arctic Cooling with standing out retention screws should fit in there easily. However, you will have to remove the graphics card in order to install or replace the memory modules, because it will not let you open the DIMM slot latches right next to it.

You can see numerous connectors along the lower edge of the mainboard PCB including four-pin fan connector, audio connectors (8-channel Sigmatel 9274D codec), additional VGA power connector, color-coded block of front panel connectors, internal USB connectors and IEEE1394a connector (Texas Instruments TSB43AB).

Intel DX38BT doesn’t really have a Clear CMOS jumper. There is a so-called config-jumper instead. In default position the mainboard uses current BIOS settings and password. If you reset the jumper the mainboard goes into configuration mode, boots with default settings and offers access to additional menu where you can reset the password, for instance. If you remove the jumper cap completely, the board will boot in BIOS restoring mode, which may be useful if BIOS reflashing failed.

There are no PS/2 connectors for keyboard and mouse on the mainboard back panel. They are missing not because there is not enough space for them: there is enough empty space between two eSATA and the first pair of USB ports.

Instead there are 8 USB ports on the rear panel. Besides, there is an IEEE1394 connector, network TJ45 connectors and a block of audio-jacks including an optical SPDIF.

By the way, speaking of present and missing connectors. You may have noticed that not only PS/2 connectors are missing on the Intel DX38BT mainboard, but there is also no FDD connector. Unlike Windows Vista, which is only one year old now, Windows XP came out six years ago and is still used widely. This operating system doesn’t recognize USB flash drives, it requires a floppy disk to upload the RAID driver when Windows XP is installed onto a RAID array or when SATA HDD is used in AHCI mode. So, some Intel DX38BT owners working in Windows XP may face some problems. Of course, this is not a crucial problem, as all you need to do is buy a USB FDD drive, but you would certainly prefer to save the time and trouble.

Moreover, it is pretty strange that although there is no FDD, IDE connectors are still there. Of course, it would be worse if they made it the other way around, but at least it would have been more logical, as Intel chipsets stopped supporting IDE starting with P965 Express. That is why they had to use an additional controller to get IDE support onto Intel DX38BT mainboard. Therefore, the following question arises: didn’t South Bridges lose Parallel ATA support too soon, considering that even the initiator of this innovation still uses additional onboard controllers on their mainboards? What was the reason for this decision: technical difficulty with keeping the necessary components in the South Bridge chip, aggressive lobbying from the IDE/SATA controller makers, or an obsession to push computer users somewhere towards technological progress despite the absence of real economical reasons for that? Well, this is a rhetorical question, I assume.

All in all, Intel DX38BT PCB layout is not a bad one, but not a good one either. “Satisfactory” would probably be the best word to describe it.