Asus P6T Deluxe
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Asus’s P6T Deluxe isn’t the most over-the-top Core i7 board we’ve tested, but it certainly has a leg up on Intel’s bare-bones DX58SO. For one thing, it finally brings us graphics reunification by supporting both two-card SLI and CrossFire X configurations.
And instead of the gimpy four-slot DIMM setup of Intel’s DX58SO, the P6T Deluxe features six DDR3 DIMM slots. The board, of course, supports all Core i7 CPUs. Since Intel is the sole chipset provider for X58 and the memory controller is in the CPU itself, most performance differences will be the result of BIOS tweaks each manufacturer implements. We found Asus’s BIOS to be far friendlier than the Intel board’s, which at first glance seems designed for engineers. Truth be told, though, the Asus BIOS can be just as daunting if you tread into the Advanced section.
One thing we did like about the Intel board’s BIOS was the ability to set the individual Turbo mode settings. Asus forces you to adjust the settings with the Asus TurboV utility, but we couldn’t set each core separately. That made it difficult to compare performance between the P6T and the DX58SO, as each board was configured slightly differently. To be frank, performance judgments should be suspended since BIOS updates for both boards are still rolling out twice a month.
As expected, not all was right with the P6T. On occasion, the board would not see our USB drive. Documentation was also substandard, which left us pushing buttons in the numerous applications until we blue-screened the board. Hey, Asus, how about combining all the disparate apps into one utility? Nevertheless, we did manage to bring our 3.2GHz Core i7 up to a fairly stable 3.8GHz on the P6T Deluxe.
There’s a lot to like here, including an improved ExpressGate browser that lets you save files from the preboot browser to a USB key, and a cool Palm display that lets you both overclock the board and remotely monitor its vitals. There are some rough spots still to be ironed out, but we’d definitely take the P6T over Intel’s board at this point.
Asus P6T Deluxe
Speed
Graphics reunification, six DIMMs, and a nifty external LCD display.
Point Break
BIOSes and applications are still a little rough around the edges.
8
Benchmarks
| Asus P6T Deluxe | Intel DX58SO | |
|---|---|---|
| PC Mark Vantage x64 | 7,989 | 7,082 |
| ProShow (min:sec) | 9:24 | 9:12 |
| MainConcept (min:sec) | 17:15 | 18:00 |
| 3DMark Vantage CPU | 11,312 | 11,239 |
| 3DMark Vantage GPU | 49,183 | 45,424 |
| HD Tach (MB/s) | 173 | 185 |
| Valve Particle Test (fps) | 159 | 155 |
| Quake 4 (fps) | 252 | 224 |
| Everest Ultimate Copy RAM (MB/s) | 18, 170 | 19, 182 |
| Everest Ultimate Latency TAM (ns) | 32.5 | 31.9 |
| Sisoft Sandra Bandwidth (GB/s) | 27.03 | 26.3 |
Best scores are bolded. Our test bed consists of a Core i7-965 Extreme Edition CPU, 6GB of Corsair DDR3/1600, an EVGA GeForce 280 GTX videocard, a PC Power and Cooling TurboCool 1200 power supply, a WD Raptor 150GB drive, and Vista Home Premium 64-bit. HD Tach scores were achieved using an Intel X25-M SSD.
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maniacm0nk3y
March 18, 2009 at 6:16pm
I have the V2 board, very good. They say it is improved, smoothed out and takes out the problematic SAS chip. I wish that they put 2 more SATA ports in place of them. I was surprised. I went from having just 1 SATA connection to 4.
The ExpressGate...well I have not tried it, but its always on startup so I might check it out sometime.
Good reviews.
mini6090
February 02, 2009 at 4:08pm
i own this board, great board... considering intels website and driver download, i don't think i could ever knowingly by a device from them... it's easier to download from an alternative site then through them, pathetic, and most of my downloads time out, and that's with multiple connections
expressgate is on it's own chip, which i would only believe has some onboard memory as well. the idea of it is that with just the motherboard alone (and of course a cpu and memory), you can do basic functions with the PC. i used it to test basic functionality of my hardware when i got the mobo, it can't really max out an i7, so just leaving it powered on, roaming the internet told me the board and other parts were not defective for the most part. you can search files\photos through expressgate, but if you have a raid array, your assed out, which is stupid considering they could fit drivers on it somehow, especially if they know it's being teamed with certain raid chips.
Altek
Asus P6T
Core i7 920
9gb Corsair Dominator 8-8-8-24
4x10,000RMP raptors (2xStriped Arrays)
EVGA GTX260
Fatl1ty X-Fi
Caboose
February 02, 2009 at 7:04am
I really wish that one major improvement that Asus would make to ExpressGate, is including onboard memory for ExpressGate to operate. It's absolutely no good to have ExpressGate on one of your HDD's, an optical disc, or memory stick. HDD's fail, optical discs are very slow, and memory sticks stick out.
With this latest HDD issue with Seagate, if you had to send in your drive to be replaced, or just wait for Seagate to release a firmware that won't brick your drive, having ExpressGate on it's own onboard memory would be really nice. But, they need to straighten out their website and documentation first I guess...
-= I don't want to be dead, I want to be alive! Or... a cowboy! =-
kleinkinstein
February 02, 2009 at 6:44am
Any of the Gigabyte x58 boards slap the Asus offerings silly! Price, performance, features, bios...everything!
http://tinyurl.com/cvucno
Woofa
April 13, 2009 at 4:57pm
You might not want to be so much of an ignorant fanboy. I'm not saying there's anything inherently wrong with Gigabyte boards, I've owned/built plenty, but your statement is that of a total fanboy or someone that if he doesn't already work for Gigabyte apparently should in their marketing dept. I don't see any Giga boards at the top of the OC speed charts and reliability is very apparently no better nor features, especially if you take into account Gigabyte's typically not very good software. The best thing is that the two top of the line Giga boards offer 10 SATA ports. For some reason the Gigabyte boards have been seeing a lot of eth port failures too. Do you build systems for a living like I do? Yeah, didn't think so.
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