ASUS P6T Deluxe

The very first X58 motherboard, (not quite) hot off the presses!

X58. We all want to have one, use one, and some of us even want to be one. So when ASUS tempted us with sweet promises of a look at this enthusiast-grade board, we had a duty to our readers to not only accept, but to tauntingly wave it at you. Ok, so now we’ve had our fun, it’s on to the board itself.

Starting at the CPU socket (which is the new LGA1366, to go with the new Nehalem chip), an array of solid capacitors and ferrite chokes are arranged in neat groups, and out of the way of most heatsinks – clearance shouldn’t be a problem. There are sixteen whole phases of power here, something so completely over-the-top that you’ll never use it, but it’s always nice to know you have it. In the usual place we have six DDR3 slots, each spaced just enough to allow larger DIMMs, and each channel occupies a single orange and adjacent black slot. That’s right, triple channel memory is available on this board.

Along the right-hand side we have the board’s battery, placed in an upright holster (extremely handy for those who overclock), the 24-pin power socket, right-angled IDE, four right-angled SATA, two upright SATA, and the rather amazing inclusion of two right-angled SAS ports (this is a server-grade storage interface, but is also backwards compatible with SATA). The 8-pin CPU power is in the top left of the board, as per usual.

In the bottom-right hand corner, we have onboard power and reset buttons, as well as all the frontpanel headers for switches, LEDs, and case ports. Also present here is the Marvell 88SE6320 chip that feeds those two SAS ports. Moving along the bottom we find a floppy header (which refuses to die a quick and painless death) and the audio header.

The expansion slot area is the usual affair, but has capacity for TriSLI or Crossfire – thanks to the NT200 chip and X58 chipset respectively. There’s also an ExpressGate quickboot OS chip here, but this is only really handy for checking emails and light web use. Five fan headers are placed strategically on the board, giving you plenty of flexibility.

The back panel is decadently well-thought out with six USB, two Ethernet, 7.1 audio, Coaxial/Optical, Firewire, eSATA and a PS/2 port. This covers you for pretty much anything you’d need to plug in, without the annoyance of expansion cards.

This board, as we very subtly alluded to before, has Intel’s latest X58 chipset. This chipset is bereft of any memory controller, but has 32 PCIe 2.0 x16 lanes that allow Crossfire with full bandwidth to two of the slots. And if that weren’t enough, there’s also a NT200 chip present underneath the cooling array that adds another 16 PCIe 2.0 lanes, that allows Triple SLI across all the three PCIe slots. Even though the X58 chipset doesn’t produce as much heat due to the removal of the controller, the heatsink array became quite warm under testing due to the large amount of power phases, as well as the added NT200 chip. Some airflow is definitely recommended (ASUS recommends a 40mm fan, with “Best for Extreme Over-clocking!” In reality, a 40mm fan moves about as much as a butterfly’s fart, so stick with a high-airflow case or 80mm+).

Performance of the board was very good compared to the Intel Reference board, returning higher scores across all the benchmarks at the same settings. We were able to reach a maximum stable speed at a QPI of 166, giving us 3984MHz stably. We could POST up to 4.05GHz, but no amount of voltage would allow it to boot into windows at or over this speed.

Overall this is a great board, with a copious amount of opulent features for a very good price – expect to see this lower when the boards hit the streets.