Asus P6T-Deluxe X58 Nehalem Motherboard Presentation
Intel S1366
by piotke
@ 2008-08-21
At the begin of this week, 18th and 19th of August to be precise, Asus held an Advanced OverClocking Contest and new Intel X58 presentation in Berlin, Germany. Madshrimps was also present and with this short article we´ll be presenting some new upcoming hardware from Asus.
A quick look on the X58 based board
Overview
At first sight the board will have following features:
- 6 times DDR3 memory slot
- 3 times 16x length PCIe slot
- 8 sata connections on board (which are only six, more about this later)
Click for bigger pictureThe board will have Asus Super Hybrid Engine (S.H.E). This is actually a combination of Asus Turbo-V Extreme overclocking solution and the already known money and energy saving EPU-system level power saving solution.
The Extreme Overclocking design will consist out of:
Turbo-VTurbo-V is a software solution that will allow you to overclock real time and allow you to even change the multiplier trough Windows on unlocked processors.
It will also control the voltage of the mainboard. The Cpu PLL, Dram, Chipset and NB-PCIe voltage in very accurate steps of 0.02 Volt.
Oc palm
The OC Palm is a USB device, looks a bit like a GPS system that will also allow you to overclock real time. This can be useful for example in 3DMark 06, where during the CPU test frequency could be lowered a bit and raised during the less cpu taxing tests. A few extra buttons will allow you to program profiles that can be with one click activated.
More P6T-deluxe details
More into detail True 16+2 phase power
The true 16 power phases are need for the cpu, and the two extra are for the memory/QPI controller. The large number of phases should protect your computer against overshoot or undershoot which often happens during rapid current changes.
This Asus board will use the Fujitsu RE Series 560µF Capacitator, where regular boards use the ME series or equivalent. The RE series are rated at 5000 hours at 105°C and over 5 years at 86°C. The ME series will only last 2000 hours at 105°C and should live only 2 years at 86°C.
Unique layoutThe following picture will explain it all, up to you to draw conclusions out of it.
Sorry for the poor quality of the picture, it's from a presentation where I clearly wasn't sitting on the front row. Unique wind flow thermal design
The new cooler on the P6T boards should be a whole thermal design crafted with aesthetics. The heatpipe and fin design directs the heat out of the system, away from the cpu. And this results in a 10° cooler configuration in Overclocking circumstances.
Fast start and resetTwo buttons will allow you to easy reset or power on your system.
Heat pipe cooler
A heat pipe and heatsink construction will not only cool the chipset but also the power circuit.
Rear I/O panel ...... will provide:
1 PS/2 connector
8 USB ports
2 times RJ45 network
Firewire
E-sata
Spdif and regular audio
SAS - Serial attached SCSI
Two of the previous mentioned serial ata ports aren't what they seem to be. They are SAS ports.
Sas raid (Seagate ST373455SS 73GB/16M) provided an average read speed of about 179 Megabyte per second, where sata raid (Western Digital WD5000ABYS 500 Gb/16M) only managed to get 117 Megabyte per second. Also did the Sas setup it more stable, whilst the SATA had drops to about 75 Megabyte per second. SAS can usually be seen on server grade hardware; SCSI never really got popular with the enthusiast crowd, let’s see if SAS will stand a chance, as it’s not a very affordable solution.
