There is a decent array of ports and connectors on the I/O panel, starting with a single PS/2 port that can be used for either a mouse or keyboard. There are eight USB 2.0 ports in four widely spaced pairs, a full array of audio connectors, a six-pin Firewire, one eSATA and dual Gigabit LAN. Plug in the supplied bracket and you gain two more USB ports and a mini four-pin Firewire.
PMP? No, Asus' OC Palm overclocking gizmo
The box of accessories includes the usual cables and also a gizmo called OC Palm which looks like a small USB digital clock. We’ve seen various external debug and POST devices from Asus in the past but this is something different, not least because it connects to a regular USB port instead of using a dedicated header on the board. Once Windows is running and you’ve installed the Asus EPU-6 Engine utility, the Asus TurboV utility for overclocking within Windows and the driver for the OC Palm device, you can use the OC Palm to monitor the innards of your PC and also to change settings on the fly.
It sounds like a spiffing idea, provided you fancy the idea of adjusting your CPU and RAM speed while you’re playing a game and can't see the Asus TurboV utility, but once again we’re not so sure. Overclock, test, test and test again and then play is our mantra.
We were hard-pressed to spot any new features in the Bios setup screen, which seemed surprising as this is new CPU architecture for Intel. But of course AMD has already pioneered an integrated memory controller and has ditched the frontside bus in favour of HyperTransport. If you’re familiar with Athlon or Phenom then Core i7 will hold few terrors.
Verdict
We can’t give the game away about the performance of the P6T Deluxe - well, not for a couple of weeks, anyway - so let’s just say that the quad-core Core i7 which we set to 2.66GHz then 3GHz crunched through benchmarks as effectively as the clock frequency suggests. It’s a similar story with triple-channel DDR 3 running at 1066MHz. The low clock speed hurts latency, while the integrated memory controller and triple-band feature delivers bandwidth like there’s no tomorrow.
As for the P6T Deluxe, well it’s a decent motherboard but it’s a very safe design that covers all of the options but it does it without adding anything exciting to the mix.
Asus P6T Deluxe Intel Core i7 motherboard
COMMENTS
Using over 4GB of RAM...
You can do it on 32bit operating systems, but you need to use PAE and will still lose chunks of your address space due to mapping PCI address space and video apertures.
It's a game for mugs : you have to use a server OS (on Windows), have PAE capable drivers (they frequently aren't - and if they're not your device will not work) and your apps have to be specially written to support larger memory (it isn't automatic most of the time).
On servers where a limited set of certified drivers are used there is no reason to use a 32bit OS, other than the hassle of reinstalling as 64bit. For consumer level hardware, the drivers won't support PAE anyway, so running a server OS is a bit daft.
64 bit operating systems just work. Certain consumer hardware manufacturers may like to pretend that they don't exist so that they avoid the driver writing hassle, and it is IME foolish to run Vista x64 in less than 4GB, but other than that things just work.
@ E
"Why not? Does the Reg sign NDAs?"
Even if not, I assume they want to continue to receive review kit in the future... ;)
2 GB in each of the 6 slots?
If I read it correctly, you can cram 2GB modules in each of the 6 slots. (six slots?!?)
Fitting 12GB on a desktop PC would be neat, I've heard of that amount of RAM in servers only. But won´t that force 64-bit OS presence, at least concerning memory management point of view? Honestly, I don´t have a clue on this one.
Yes, I´ve been under a rock in the last few months... SLI meeting crossfire sounds fun... and expensive to build on top of that mobo.
Only 2GB?
I run Win2003 Enterprise (32bit) in 8GB at home. Makes a really good webserver/SQL server ..... and I dont have issues with 64bit drivers.
I love MSDN - really good value.
Perf Numbers
"We can’t give the game away about the performance of the P6T Deluxe - well, not for a couple of weeks, anyway"
Why not? Does the Reg sign NDAs?
Also, Leo is correct about RAM!
