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Asus P6T Deluxe & Intel Nehalem CPU |
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Written by Dusan Srbljak
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Saturday, 25 October 2008 |
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Page 2 of 3
Just on a first sight, package took our breath away. We don’t know if that is because of completely new platform or because of OC Palm that came as bundle. OC Palm is little monitoring device that has full colour display (262K) with 320x240 resolution. Device is attended as controller of all relevant parameters during overclock (CPU bus, voltages, fans etc.) and it has possibility of utilizing popular Yahoo Widgets. Motherboard has standard ATX dimensions (so propagated Intel BTX standard seems that never got popularized), which means that no problems guaranteed during mounting into standard cases. From now on it seems by all chances that on motherboards based on X58 chipset will be six RAM sockets (because of mentioned triple channel). Collision of some long graphics card with safety clip-ons is completely prevented thanks to well positioned CPU sockets.
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16-phase power filtration sector was expected for this processor, but coils are arranged in 9+7 formation. Asus didn’t go cheap with power filtration for RAM memory by implementing for this purpose 3-phase power filtration unit. A very interesting sticker notice on DIMM sockets says that setting memory voltage through BIOS on higher value from 1.65V can permanently damage CPU! Time will show if this is really true, because Intel is known for enacting some limitations at launch of new platforms and then manufacturers of motherboards had to move those “safety limits” by themselves.
Cooling solution is made in true Asus’ peculiar manner – heatpipes cover MOSFET transistors around the socket, NB and SB. The only difference compared to previous designs is design of ribs on NB cooler. Another interesting detail is absence of IHS on X58 chip (Integrated Heat Spreader - metal cover, shield).
We specially did like separation of primary PCI-E x16 slots one from each other by two places, which only can contribute in better cooling for SLI and CF systems. Third PVI-E x16 slot will enable additional upgrade possibilities of graphics subsystem.
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Southbridge can pride itself with Marvell 88SE6320 SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) controller that is capable for achieving RAID 0 and 1 HDD work configurations. So far this option was reserved only for servers, so this will be a true revelation for all users that are engaged in video montage business and know how to appreciate shorter access time and higher write/read speeds of data (especially in RAID 0 mode).
We couldn’t “play” properly with BIOS of Asus P6T Deluxe so we will only established that it is made in standard “Asusish” way which means a little space is left for compromises and that means that Express Gate is also present. We have achieved stabile 180MHz for QPI (QuickPath Interconnect – let’s say that this is equivalent for previous FSB) and we must say that nominal value for QPI is 133MHz. We can only say that frequency from around 4GHz is very nice for native QuadCore processor, especially if we consider talks from month ago that locked Nehalem processors cannot be overclocked.
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MotherBoards 
