ASUS P6T Motherboard Review

Introduction

ASUS is famous for its motherboards, video cards, laptops, and other computer equipment. This company is the biggest motherboard manufacturer in the world. They have a long history regarding these products.

This motherboard uses the X58 chipset and is compatible with Core i7 processors. This combination offers great performance for ASUS customers. ASUS has been manufacturing a series of motherboards with this combination. However, some new Intel Core i7 CPUs are only supported by X58 chipset.

Lets discuss the features that make this motherboard stand out from the rest.

Features and Design (5 out of 5)

• It works with all Intel Core i7 LGA-1366 CPUs such as the 965, 940 and 920 CPUs.

• Triple channel memory is used

• Intel’s Quick Path Interconnect is used and can support bandwidth up to 25.6GB/Second.

• The board supports 24GB of DDR3 2000MHz memory.

• Intel’s Extreme Memory Profile is supported by this motherboard.

• Stores overclocking profiles in the memory using SPD.

• Currently, NVIDIA’s SLI configurations are not supported. Due to this, the gaming performance provided by this board is very low.

• Supports Three-way Crossfire.

• Supports ATI’s Crossfire X with two 4870 x2s.

• It has auto-phase switching.

• Turbo V is used in this board and works as an overclocking tool. This technology permits to overclock without rebooting the operating system.

• The voltage of CPU and DRAM can be adjusted with very high precision. It allows adjusting voltage by intervals of 0.02v.

• It takes only few seconds to boot into Linux. Most motherboards require at least one minute.

• It uses a heatsink instead of a fan for cooling, and also covers the Northbridge with a heatpipe. Due to this, it cools itself well compared to other motherboards.

Performance (4 out of 5)

Although this motherboard has some solid features, there are a few problems when it comes to everyday use and performance.

• The SATA connection is placed at the worst position. You have to place the SATA cables suitably so that the wires do not block the air flow to the GPU.

• Large video cards come into contact with the motherboard’s integrated audio circuit.

• You may face a shutdown problem. Actually, it’s not the board’s fault; it is due to the ASUS software on the driver disk. This problem causes an unnecessary hang during shut down, especially if you use Vista. If you want to get rid of this problem, don’t install ASUS ACPI.

Value (4 out of 5)

This motherboard is comparatively expensive. Its cost is around £194, and this cost is very close to other motherboards that have more features. Therefore, this board doesn’t offer the best features for its price.

Overall Rating (4 out of 5)

ASUS is a well known company and manufactures some of the best motherboards. However, the cost is relatively high. The ASUS P6T motherboard is one of the few boards that uses the X58 chipset. This is what differentiates this board from any other available in the market. The main disadvantage of this board is that it doesn’t support SLI.

Still, this board offers solid performance compared to most other X58 motherboards.

References

Image: ASUS P6Tmotherboard-firingsquad.com