The first system we looked at was the SX38P3 Deluxe, Shuttle’s new flagship barebone system. The SX38P3 will replace the SD37PV2 as the Shuttle’s high-end Intel based barebone. Since I personally use the SD37PV2, I was interested to see if the SX38P3 Deluxe would have the same basic design flaw that the SD37PV2 had: no standard PCI slot. So we took off the SX38P3 Deluxe’s side panel and saw that in addition to One PCI Express x16 slot, there is indeed a PCI slot. Shuttle caught a lot of criticism for using two PCI Express x16 slots in the SD37PV2, so it is very nice to see that they’ve listened to both reviews and consumer feedback with their latest barebones XPC. We took a sneak peak at the back of the SX38P3 Deluxe as well, and saw that it had no legacy ports: instead it had six USB 2.0 ports on the back panel. We’re not quite sure how large the power supply is, but will be sure to find out when the show officially gets under way.

We were also able to take a look at the G33 and the P35 based Shuttles, and they look equally impressive. We were able to look under the hood of the P35 based SP35P3 Deluxe and saw that like its X38 based counterpart, it also has a single PCI Express x16 slot and standard PCI slot implementation. We’ll find out more about these when Shuttle officially announces them during the show.

As you can see from the pictures above, the board has a large heatpipe design that cools the north bridge, south bridge, and CPU/Memory voltage regulators. It has dual gigabit Ethernet, supports DDR3-1600, and uses all Japanese made SMD solid capacitors.

The board was shown running with two Radeon X2900XT cards that were in Crossfire mode.

Gigabyte was also showing off their new AMD based chipsets. The first we saw was the AMD 690G based GA-MA69G-S3H. The GA-MA69G-S3H features an integrated Radeon X1250 Graphics processor, support for DDR2-800, and is HDMI ready. This board is intended for the lower to mid-ranged portion of the market and should retail at around $100.

Gigabyte was also showing off their high end AMD board, the RD790 based GA-M790-DQ6. The DQ6 has support for Quad Graphics...yes, you read that right, FOUR graphics cards. We’ll be sure to get more information about this when the show officially starts, we're sure many of you are excited to see what four graphic cards in a system will be able to do.

And as you can see, Gigabyte was showing off the GA-M790-DQ6 actually running four single-slot PCI Express graphics cards all at once. We’ll be sure to inquire which cards these were and what kind of performance we should expect from the GA-M790-DQ6 in the next few days.

We were able to briefly stop by and take a look at DFI’s X38 motherboard as well. As you can see, it looks to be in typical LanParty line fashion, but DFI told us that this board is just a reference design and that the board that we’ll see come to market will have a unique cooler design that will be very impressive.

We were also able to take a look at ABIT’s X38 based board as well, named the IX38 QuadGT. The IX38 QuadGT on display also had no special cooling apparatus, but we’ll be sure to stop by ABIT’s booth when the show actually starts and see what they are planning to do with their X38 board.

And we also briefly stopped by the ASUS booth, but as it was still under heavy construction, we weren’t able to see any X38 based boards on display. We’ll be sure to come back here as well.