yea.....
how about we cut all that down, take out everthing but the basics (pci-E x16 (2-3 slots), 4 or so SATA, a few USB's and a good voltage regulator, a nice bios and maybe raid 0/1/1+0 with a nice 10/100/1000 port. Oh, im sure without all the exess crap (IFMA, XMP, etc...) we would finaly have a motherboard with a low cost, and INSANE overclocking capability.

but no...we HAVE TO HAVE XMP and IFMA and RAID 1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9/90/1941/1351/6247/38248 and JBOD along with 35925 ports, 24 unkown functions 1031142526 unused bios options and a gajjilion other options that no one even uses 99% of the 100% time.

/end rage at motherboard makers/designers.

(p.s. include IDE->SATA converters with your SATA only motherboards k thx.)

Wow, neat comedians there at ASUS...
From what Ive heard, the X38 WAS MADE FOR supporting 1600 MHz FSB

@ above: =)

AMD memory bandwidth advantage on desktop nullified. Intel is going ahead with guns blazing. What will be the next FSB? 2133MHz?

1600 MHz FSB should not be problem even for P965 chipset. In fact overclocked Core2Duos are working with such FSB (mine E6320 only with 1400 MHz, but 350 MHzx7 is limitation of my particular CPU). Earlier Asus and abit have introduced support for 1333 MHz FSB CPUs, releasing updated BIOSes for their mainboards, so support for 1600 MHz in X38 is not big surprise.

I really wish they would just skip to the memory controllers they use on the graphics cards. The graphics cards are already using memory in the Gigabyte range, so why not just design a GPU just like a CPU (drop in replacement) and tie the whole system into one memory bus with the fastest memory on the market?

All these disparate systems require wait states because of timing issues and latencies of going from one bus to another bus, and yet another bus. They really need to just make the chip set support ddr5/rambus/etc and just get it over with. The price difference wouldn't be that much as far as memory goes, plus it would speed the entire PC platform up considerably enough to warrant this action.