ASUS Unveils its X58 Board

As we near the fourth quarter of the year, Intel's X58 chipset is almost ready to be unveiled to the public. Made for the upcoming Nehalem family of processors from Intel, now rechristened Core i7, the new chipset will have a 1366-pin socket for these new processors and also a new QuickPath Interconnect technology, including an onboard memory controller supporting triple-channel DDR3.

ASUS has sent us an early version of one of its X58 motherboards, the ASUS P6T Deluxe, which was previously mentioned here. This motherboard will support up to 24GB of DDR3-1333 memory, thanks to its six DIMM slots. It will also have features like a Serial Attached SCSI controller to support higher-end SAS hard drives for power users who desire enterprise class performance.

Other proprietary ASUS technologies and features, like its ExpressGate, Stack Cool 2 and a new unique thermal heatsink design will aim to attract enthusiasts when the ASUS P6T Deluxe is officially released in the coming weeks. Before we get a Core i7 and start testing this board, here's a pictorial preview of what to expect:

We'll have more in-depth information about this motherboard, including benchmarks, when we get a Core i7 in our labs.
It may be a standard sized ATX board but there's not an inch of free space on the PCB, with ASUS packing its own features, not to mention the standard X58 + ICH10R features. Connectors are all placed at the edge of the boards for easy access.
We saw eight USB 2.0 ports, eSATA port, two Gigabit LAN ports, FireWire, optical and coaxial S/PDIF outputs and audio jacks. There's even a PS/2 connector still, so backward compatibility is not as issue.


This is the new LGA1366 socket for the upcoming Core i7 (Nehalem) processor from Intel. ASUS has gone for a 16-phase PWM for the processor and solid capacitors from Fujitsu rated to operate at up to 105 degrees Celsius. As usual, heat-pipe based passive heatsinks are used to cool the MOSFETs surrounding the socket.

Six DIMM slots for DDR3 (up to 1333MHz) memory, supporting up to 24GB of RAM (with 4GB DIMMs when available) or up to 12GB (with 2GB DIMMs) through a 3-channel CPU integrated memory controller for a total memory bandwidth of 3200MB/s. This is one of the main highlights of the new platform and processor combination.