ASUS P6X58D Premium

One seriously packed motherboard.

I've missed the X58 chipset. Sure, it's a little toasty when running, and has to be paired with a southbridge to manage to do the most basic of storage tasks, but it comes with a feeling of seriously elite tech that the P55 chipset never seems able to convey. It comes with a feeling of power, of sheer unadulterated geekdom. And that is why I love this board.

Expertly cooled with a minimalistic heatsink that covers the X58 chip in the middle of the mobo, all the power phases for the LGA1366 socket and the ICH10 Southbridge, it managed to remain surprisingly cool even when under load. Its coolness didn't stop there, and the PCB colour helps it to look like one serious piece of tech. While the heatsinks do spin around three sides of the CPU socket, they're quite flat and there's plenty of space to install even the largest of cooling gear. There's a decently vast expanse between the socket and the six DDR3 slots, allowing installation of up to six sticks in three channels of memory bandwidth, tunnelling directly into the CPU for maximum speed.

Power needs are supplied by the typical 8- and 24-pin power connectors that lie in their usual places, though the 8-pin connector might prove a bit of a squeeze when installing within the confines of a case. Storage options cover six SATA 2.0 ports from the ICH10 chipset, a strangely cut-down amount whose extra bandwidth has been diverted not to the full complement of ports; but rather towards an onboard Marvell chip. This chip provides two SATA 3.0 ports, tunnelling into the Southbridge to provide an interesting boost in speed (see below), though the lack of an IDE port on the board does limit the storage options somewhat.

Comparing the same Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB via SATA 2 & 3 on the same board yielded a noticeable, but not breathtaking, performance increase.

Along the bottom of the mobo lie the usual headers you'd expect, as well as hard power and reset buttons that can help with overclocking. Annoyingly there is no Clear CMOS, though the auto-recovery of the BIOS is decent enough to get you out of most overzealous settings. There is another button on the board right next to the DRAM slots, but this is the MemOK! button that insofar as can be determined is about as useful as a leather finish on your car's tyres. Onboard audio is the usual top-end Via chip, the VT2020.

Expansion slots are well crafted and provide capacity for triple, dual or single graphics cards without too much slowdown; plenty of PCIe 2.0 lanes are still available, a limitation that the P55 platform suffers from. Rear I/O options are decent too, with two PS/2, Clear CMOS, two USB 3.0 ports (from an onboard controller chip), Optical/Coaxial, four USB, two Ethernet, 6-pin Firewire and 7.1 channel audio. Why there was a Firewire port thrown into the mix rather than more USB ports is confusing, but at least USB 3.0 is backwards compatible.

Performance of the board at stock settings was admirable, proving that ASUS has achieved some serious tweakage across both Intel platforms. While the overclock on the Core i7 975 reached 4238MHz (163 x 26, 1.475V), the chip felt like it wanted to go further but no extra speed could be squeezed out. For an RRP of $449, which will be lower in stores, this is a decent board that offers solid support for future technologies, and has nice performance to boot.