Digitimes reports that the Intel X48 chipset (the followup to the X38 with supposedly the only major difference being official 1600MHz FSB support) will apparently be shipped in the middle of March.

The X48 was originally scheduled to ship in January, however shipment was held back to allow motherboard manufacturers tosell up their X38 inventory.

Apparently the Core 2 Extreme QX9770 quad core processor may become available at the same time as the X48 chipset.

Asustek  has announced has announced its X48 based P5E3 Premium WiFi-AP motherboard, supporting up to DDR3-2000 dual channel memory,  dual 16x PCIe 2.0 GPU lots, and Express Gate BIOS resident web browser and VOIP.