The folks at VR-Zone share with us some fresh details on this supposed 'X48' chipset from Intel to be mass-produced sometime soon, this news coming to us before X38 has even had a chance to bed itself into the market just yet.

X48 is said to be basically a 'cherry picked' X38 chipset resulting in better overclockability and official support for a 1600MHz FSB. I dare say pricing on these puppies will be quite unattractive to most people but there's always the crowd who want the best of everything which will still allow these to move in decent volume.

VR-Zone also briefly make mention of an "EIST bug" present in existing reference X38 boards which X48 fixes, though this is the first i've heard of such an issue with X38 and they haven't expanded on their comments about it.

It's expected that we'll see X48 boards surface sometime during Q1 2008.

Intel will have an updated version of their DX38BT board using the X48 chipset and we heard it is likely to be called DX48BT or DX38BT2. Intel X48 is essentially X38 chipset but cherry picked so overclockability can be further enhanced. X48 will also officially support FSB1600. More importantly, X48 is to fix the EIST bug present in the X38 chipset that requires motherboard manufacturers to rework their X38 boards. Boards based on X48 chipset are slated to appear in Q1 2008.