ASUS P6T Deluxe X58 Motherboard Review

Page 2 - Packaging, Contents and First look on the mobo

ASUS P6T Deluxe costs over 400$ and is definitely not intended to be used in servers and workstations, hence the shiny, fancy packaging :) Big box and lots of extra stuff (enough to make any user squeal with joy).

Opening the box we see the motherboard, casting it aside (GENTLY!) we dig in, to find what treasures lie underneath!

Hot diggity! In it of course we find the standard SATA, PATA (and assorted other) cables and additional USB and other port plates. The ASUS Q-connector, have been slightly upgrades and now has not only Power-on/off, reset, speaker and hdd & power LED connection but also few other we really doubt will ever be used. there is the inevitable instruction book too, a driver CD and most importantly - a fan for the North bridge in case you use water cooling for your CPU or overclock a lot (resulting in higher chipset voltage while having ill air flow inside the case). An SLI or Crossfire bridge is also provided (we honestly paid not enough attention to it, it most probably was indeed an SLI bridge, since all Crossfire bear their own with them).

And here is a look at the new unique ASUS - Stack Cool 2 cooling. Watching the the animation on the ASUS website it seems that the air from the CPU cooler passes through the big North bridge radiator and is correctly channeled in the right direction. But well... The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry... the channeled air "hits" the back of the videocard and the insides of the case, so if you lack ample ventilation it renders the aluminum radiator useless (no matter how cool it seems to look). The heatpipes its mounted on though are copper and run all the way to the South Bridge and the voltage control mosfets around the CPU. The ribs of the radiators attached to the heatpipes though seem to be optimized for the Core i7 box cooler (it "throws" air all around the CPU).

The pictures above do give accurate idea how much bigger is the Core i7 socket compared to the Core 2 one. You can also see the 6 memory slots, grouped by channels and bearing the aggressive tiger stripes colours :)