Saturday, November 8, 2008

Sneak Peek: Four Core i7 X58 Motherboards


And so it begins. The first motherboard to land in our lab (besides Intel’s own X58 platform, which remains under embargo, but is hardly a secret given its presence at IDF) is ASUS’ P6T Deluxe. This ASUS plaform seems to be targeted at both overclockers and workstation customers. After all, it includes a USB-powered OC Palm device, used for handheld overclocking and an onboard SAS controller, which enables high-availability storage at a considerable premium for those who need more enterprise-like functionality.

As you can see from the box, SLI and CrossFire support are both part of this package, as is a considerable amount of voltage regulation—the P6T Deluxe levels 16-phase vCore circuitry and an additional two phases for the QPI/integrated memory controller inside the Core i7 CPU. Express Gate, ASUS’ insta-boot operating environment, and EPU, the company’s energy-saving technology, are also included.

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