Conclusions
With the i7 being so new and so much more powerful that the Core 2, I find it a little hard to separate the processor and motherboard as far as capabilities. I’ll try to limit my conclusions to the P6T only, so suffice it to say, the i7 is very powerful, and this particular i7 920 is an overclocking monster.
The Asus P6T worked well with the i7. I was able to achieve a 50% overclock, which puts performance in the realm of a stock clocked i7 Extreme Edition 965, which costs over three times as much as the i7 920. The board’s layout is good, and is full-featured, having most of the bennies you will find on the more expensive models of the P6T series. It sports all of Asus’ unique features and supports all the capabilities of the X58 chipset, including memory capacity, 3-way SLI, and CrossFireX.
The NB and SB coolers are much more simple than its bigger brothers, but the X58 runs pretty cool anyway, so what the P6T has in the way of cooling is more than sufficient.
Some will find the bundle pretty sparse, but it is the basic model of the series, and extra goodies mean extra cost. There is enough there for the beginning builder, and the geek seldom uses much of the bundle anyway.
I did have some issues with the BIOS, but it’s still pretty early in the i7 game. I would definitely like to see in real time on the AI Tweaker page what my CPU clock is. I’d also like to be able to adjust the QPI multiplier, and have some more memory divider choices. I haven’t examined the BIOS of the better models, but I know that the Deluxe model has some settings not available on the basic model, hopefully we’ll get them on a later BIOS update.
The Asus P6T runs $249 at my favorite online retailer. There are some similarly configured boards that cost less, but it is the cheapest board I found capable of running over DDR3-1600 memory, and the price is about midway of the pack, if you exclude the most extreme boards that cost well over $100 more than this one. The lowest-end board I found is just under $200, but capable of running memory no higher than DDR3-1333. ThinkComputers gives the Asus P6T X58 motherboard a 9 out of 10 score.
Pros:
– Lots of features for the price
– Excellent overclocker
– Supports all X58 capabilities
Cons:
– BIOS is satisfactory, but could use a few more settings
– Some may find the bundle prohibitive