ASUS P6T Deluxe Motherboard Review :: ASUS P6T Deluxe OC Palm Edition Layout

The CPU area is clear of obstacles allowing the use of after-market cooling solutions with this board without interfering with other computer components. There is a row of Japanese capacitors on the right hand side, the left hand side and the top of the LGA-1366 socket. Around the CPU socket is the heatsink connected to the ICH10R connected to the X58 chip and out the MOSFETS and rear heatsink by a heatpipe.

Expansion slots on the board include three PCI Express x16 slots. When three cards are installed the slots either operate in x16, x16, x1 mode or x16, x8, x8 mode. Three cards can operate in SLI mode or CrossfireX mode. The P6T Deluxe has the ability to run up to Quad-SLI with two 9800GX2s in SLI mode or CrossfireX with two 4870 X2 cards. The other expansion options on the board include a PCI Express x4 slot and two PCI slots. In between the PCI Express x16 slot 2 and the last PCI slots the SSD for the Xpress Gate Operating system.

Memory support on the board is up to 1333MHz DDR3 memory. If the system is overclocked, the memory speed can be raised to 1600MHz. The X58 chipset supports up to 6 DIMM Slots on the motherboard with ASUS's P6T Deluxe supporting up to 12GB of DDR3-1600MHz memory in six memory modules. The board supports Intel's Extreme Memory Profile (XMP), which is their version of SLI-Ready memory.

The left side of the board has the additional USB headers to bring the total supported by the motherboard to 12. Here also are the various Front Panel connections. There is a Firewire port on this same position, bringing the total supported by the board to two. The FDD and IDE connectors are also on this edge. One note that installing three dual slot long video cards may present a problem for those wanting to use these buttons.

Hard Drive expansion is controlled by the ICH10R Southbridge which supports up to 6 SATA drives natively. The P6T Deluxe naturally comes with six SATA ports including four that are of a sideways slant allowing installation of video cards without obstruction of the SATA ports as some motherboards would tend to do. Also on the board is an IDE port and a FDD port allowing the installation of those devices if you have legacy DVD drives or FDD drives. Two SAS ports are controlled by a Marvell 88SE6320 and an external SATA port and the IDE port are controlled by a Marvell 88SE6111 chip.

Onboard sound is provided by an ADI ADI200B 8-channel High Definition Audio CODEC. This CODEC supports Jack-Detection, Multi-Streaming (7.1+2 channel), and Front Panel Jack-Retasking. Modern onboard audio like the AD2000B have caused problems for soundcard makers to make a living with soundcards alone. ADI did not include a SupremeFX II card so it doesn't support EAX 4.0 but everything that the High Definition Audio standard requires. Their Rampage II board should have that card in the bundle .he PS/2 connector. As most people use USB mice and keyboards, this is a good compromise of having legacy and modern connectivity.