Asus P6T Deluxe

Verdict:

[+] P6T

Great layout; fast; easy to overclock; CrossFire and SLI support

[-] 60 PEAS

Expensive

The Asus P6T Deluxe is based on Intel’s X58 chipset and has the LGA1366 socket of the new Core i7 range of CPUs (see p36). The new socket isn’t compatible with LGA775; you’ll need a new cooler, as the socket is larger and the cooler mounting holes are further apart.

EXPANSION SLOTS

The board has three PCI-E 2.0 slots, which allows for full-speed CrossFire or SLI dual-card setups. The P6T Deluxe doesn’t have an nForce 200 chip, and we don’t expect any motherboard released in the next few months to have such a chip. See p45 for our SLI and CrossFire testing on X58.

While the X58 chipset can give both cards of a dual-card SLI or CrossFire setup 16 lanes’ worth of PCI-E 2.0 bandwidth, the third slot has only eight lanes, so triple-card setups could suffer. The board also has two PCI slots and one 1x PCI-E slot. Should you use two dual-slot graphics cards, you’ll still be able to use one PCI slot and the 1x PCI-E slot.

PORTS

The PCB has EIDE and floppy headers, defying murmurings that they were to be phased out with the release of LGA1366 and Core i7. Joining the EIDE port are four RAID-capable S-ATA II ports and two SAS ports, which are aligned parallel to the PCB for neat cabling. A further two S-ATA II ports sit just behind this bank of six.

The P6T Deluxe has four additional fan headers, three USB 2 headers and one FireWire header. Ports on the back panel include optical and coaxial S/PDIF, six analogue audio out ports, one eSATA and two Gigabit LAN ports. Purveyors of ancient peripherals will be pleased to learn that there’s also a single PS/2 port for an old keyboard or mouse.

Despite the extra PCB surface area required for the six DDR3 sockets, the P6T Deluxe has a superb layout.

PERFORMANCE

Click here to open the benchmark results (opens in new window)

Click here to download the Custom PC Media Benchmarks to compare performance with your PC

Running at stock speeds, the image editing and multitasking scores were both higher than 1,200 points, but the P6T Deluxe helped the eight processing threads of our 2.66GHz Intel Core i7-920 to produce a mammoth 2,248 points in the video encoding test. The hefty overall score of 1,565 points means this 2.66GHz Core i7 system is more than 50 per cent faster than our reference 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo E6750 PC at stock speeds.

With a Zotac GeForce GTX 260 AMP!, the P6T Deluxe scored a 34fps minimum and a 45fps average in Crysis at 1,280 x 1,024.

OVERCLOCKING

There are only two memory divider options in the BIOS of the P6T Deluxe. With the CPU at stock speed, these are 800MHz and 1,066MHz, meaning that if your memory runs any faster than 1,066MHz you’ll lose speed.

When testing for a maximum QPI frequency, we opted for the lower memory divider to ensure our overclock wasn’t limited by the memory. Dropping the multiplier to the minimum 12x, we pushed the QPI up from 133MHz to 210MHz.

While pushing for the maximum overclock of which the board was capable, we opted for the higher of the two memory dividers. We left the Corsair PC3-10666 at its stock voltage of 1.6V, and pushed the CPU to 3.6GHz at its stock voltage. Only when we pushed the CPU beyond 3.6GHz did we need to add more voltage, which is incredible for a CPU shipping at 2.66GHz.

With the vcore at 1.475V, and the Southbridge and X58 chip overvolted to 1.3V, we finally pushed the Core i7-920 to 4GHz. With a QPI of 200MHz, the memory was now running at 1.6GHz.

Not only was the Core i7 surprisingly easy to overclock, but the performance gains were also incredible. The minimum frame rate in Crysis jumped from 34fps to 39fps, while the overall Media Benchmark score rose from 1,565 to 2,294. This score was the second best in the world at the time of writing, and was achieved with basic air-cooling.

It should also be noted that during all of our testing, we didn’t experience any flakiness from the P6T Deluxe. This is a great result, considering that the kit arrived in our office more than a month before Core i7 was due to launch.

OC PALM

The P6T Deluxe ships with a small PDA-type device called the Asus OC Palm; as well as having features such as a component temperature monitor, this allows you to overclock the motherboard. Unfortunately, our review sample wasn’t up to much. We achieved a menial overclock of 2.8GHz with the little gizmo, but anything over that crashed the system, proving that there’s still no substitute for good, low-level dirty BIOS overclocking.

CONCLUSION

There was a lot of speculation and doom-saying on various forums about the overclocking ability of lower-end Core i7 CPUs, but the P6T Deluxe proves these pessimists wrong. The P6T Deluxe isn’t only a good overclocker, but it also has an excellent layout. Add to this the rock-solid stability as we pushed the clock speeds higher, and the end result is a superb board that gets the most from Intel’s excellent new CPU. Only the high price prevents unequivocal recommendation.

DFI Lanparty JR P45-T2RS	85%
Foxconn Destroyer	79%
Intel DG45FC	81%
Asus P6T Deluxe	87%
Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS4	78%
DFI Lanparty DK P45-T2RS PLUS	80%
Asus Maximus II Formula	80%

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