ASUS P6X58D Premium Motherboard Review :: Layout

Board

4-pin CPUFan

8-pin

Heatsink

ASUS uses their standard purple PCB to go along with their color of the box of the board. The P6X58D Premium has a small group of capacitors and the 8-pin power connector in the upper right hand corner of the board. The CPUFan header is next of the 4-pin variety. On the bottom of the right hand side of the board lays an OverVoltage jumper that allows you to overvolt the CPU.

MOSFET Heatsink

X58 Northbridge

MOSFET heatsink 2

CPU area

The MOSFETs are covered by two heatsinks that are connected via a heatpipe. They lead out to the X58 chip. This is further lead out to the ICH10R Southbridge via another heatpipe. This arrangement surrounds the CPU Socket on three sides. The P6X58D Premium uses the LGA 1366 interface for the CPU and can take Core i7 CPUs and the upcoming six core CPUs from Intel.

heatpipe

Capacitors

ICH10R

OV CPU

The board has six slots for triple channel DDR3 memory. To install three memory sticks simply use like colored DIMM slots to get triple channel memory. Likewise if you have six memory sticks install the memory into each slot. The memory controller is on the Core i7 CPU, with up to DDR3-1333 natively supported by those CPUs. When using overclocking the board can support up to DDR3-2000 speeds with no problem.

MemOK

DIMM Slots

Back of board

Winbond chip

The bottom of the board starts off with the MemOK button. Often, memory is not compatible with a board for some reason or other. With MemOK you can set the memory to the default basic settings with the push of a button. This is great for compatibility and a feature of many of the ASUS high-end boards on the market. To the left of the MemOk button is a DRAM LED which lights up when trouble with the memory occurs.

EPU

fan headers

ICS chip

Firewire

Next are a 4-pin fan header and a 3-pin Chassis fan header. The middle of the board is where the 24-pin power connector is located. The next items on the board are eight SATA ports. Two of these ports are colored blue, these are SATA 6 GB/s ports controlled by the Marvell 88SE9123-NAA2 PCIe SATA 6Gb/s controller. The six controlled by the Intel ICH10R Southbridge are sideways facing, allowing long video cards to be installed without issue.

USB

Marvell chip

SATA 6 Gb/second ports

SATA 2 ports

The Front Panel I/O is the first item on the left side of the board edge. Next to that are two jumpers for Overvolting the memory and QuickPathInterface. There are two USB headers on the board followed by a blank space for a third USB header. The next item on the board is the Firewire port followed by Power and Reset buttons. These allow you to turn your computer on or off without it being inside of a case allowing you to test your new configuration.

VIA VT6308 chip

Power and Reset

Express Gate

24-pin power

The CD-In and AAFP headers are next. The P6X58D Premium has a Realtek ALC889 CODEC, which is their latest CODEC available. This supports multi-streaming which is 7.1+2 channel simultaneous playback from the Front Panel Audio connections. The CODEC has high performance DACs with a 108dB signal to noise ratio (A-weighting) and high performance ADCs with a 104dB SNR. The DACS and ADCs support 44.1k/48k/88.2k/96k/176.4k/192kHz sample rate.

Chassis fan 3

FP I/O

ASMT chips

Expansion

The rear I/O on the board consists of a PS/2 port for the keyboard, a PS/2 port for the mouse, four USB 2.0 ports, 2 USB 3.0 ports, S/PDIF Out Optical and Digital, two Gigabit LAN ports controlled by Realtek RTL8111L PHYs, a Firewire port and six jacks for the onboard audio. The USB 3.0 ports are controlled by a NEC D720200F1 SuperSpeed USB controller that offers up to 4.8Gb/s instead of the 480Mbps transfer rates of USB 2.0.The inclusion of PS/2 ports is interesting, but there are still people who use PS/2 keyboards.

CD-In

ALC889 CODEC

Audio

Audio driver

NEC USB 3.0 controller

TurboV

Marvell PHYs

Rear I/O