Thread: Design and Features

The P6T Deluxe could almost be mistaken for a Core 2 motherboard as first glance, though there are a few subtle differences, such as the new CPU socket which is more rectangular than LGA77S:

The board also has six DDR 3 memory slots that take full advantage of the triple channel memory controller that's built into the Core i7 Proces¬sor. There's a large passive cooler on the northbridge that has a rather grandiose name - Wind-Flow Design Concept. The idea is that the radiating fins guide the airflow as it's drawn across the chip by the CPU cooler. This will not work with a heat-pipe cooler, but the stock Intel cooler will do.



It has three PCI-Express slots, and since the X58 supports both ATI's CrossFire as well as Nvidia's SU, you can use whatever GPU solution you like. A single PCle x4 slot and two PCI slots along with the SATA, SAS and IDE connectors are neatly arranged along the edge of the board. The SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) ports are a feature that we haven't seen on consumer level boards before. SAS drives are typically a lot faster than SATA drives, but also cost a lot more. These ports are backwards compatible with SATA, so you can safely ignore them and plug in standard drive if you so choose.

The back panel has a single PS/2 port that can be used for either a mouse or keyboard, along with eight USB 2.0 ports. Multi-channel audio, Firewire- 400, one eSATA and dual Gigabit LAN round off the ports. You can get two more USB ports with the supplied bracket, as well as another Firewire port. The box also has an OC Palm device. This is a small LCD screen that plugs into the board via USB, and lets you overclock the board on the fly from within Windows. The board also has a small amount of flash memory that contains a Linux distribution. It can boot directly into this to surf the Web. The boot time is less than five seconds, and it's useful when you need to download a driver or quickly check mail.