Hardware Asus P6T Deluxe

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2008/12/02/asus-p6t-deluxe/1

Our first X58 to complete its benchmarking, stress testing, overclocking, and all round butchering is the Asus P6T Deluxe. Built with workstation features and a kick ass BIOS, has Asus forged another winner from Intel's iron?

 

I'd love one, but the costs are still just stupid.

Brilliant review Rich.

 

Great review. Looks like this might be the foundation of my i7 box, as soon as I can afford to build a new pc that is

 

I think you should change the site you got the price from, they are out of stock bit unfair on other guys out there

 

They were available from there this morning

 

It had at least a dozen yesterday evening when I looked it up. It can still be found for around £220-225 elsewhere.

 

Mine's working fine, but I must agree about the gimmicks. SAS? It's just annoying to have the controller slow the bootup.. And I dare not disable it either because apparently it handles IDE as well, and that's where my DVD is! ExpressGate? Pretty useless.

But the board works flawlessly, you can't ruin a good pizza by pouring two kilos of pineapple on it. Just need to peel it off.

 

The SAS controller does not handle the IDE, that's a different Marvell controller which handles IDE and eSATA alone.

 

Oh, that's a relief. I just saw a similar Marvell screen for the DVD and the SAS and didn't dare touch anything.

I'll try disabling the SAS controller then, see if I can't get rid of that annoying screen during bootup.

 

Great review! I'm glad my MB uses Marvell controller...

It should reduce boot up time as well. I don't know if it's only me but whenever I have installed RAID drivers I noticed Windows boot up time increased significantly.

 

At that price, no thanks.

It is over twice (if not nearly x3) the price I paid for my Abit IP35 Pro motherboard when I moved from AMD to Core2Duo.

The price of this motherboard (and other i7 boards) is just ridiculous.


And yet it is awarded an 8 out of 10 for value. Maybe so related to its peers, but when compared with the previous generation of motherboards the value score should be closer to 4 out of 10.

 

It's a completely different market - this board was evaluated on the high end and people attribute a different kind of value. It was compared to other boards in its own market.

You cannot plug in a Core 2 into a Core i7 board and any comparison would mean there would be absolutely no point to any X58 review. Just because something is expensive, doesn't mean it offers low value, the usage model is simply different

 

i so want one of these, and fir the firt time, its pretty clear that there's just one motherboard that i want, not just a chipset or particular mfr.

maybe mummy will give me enough money for christmas

 

The value is based on the cost to features benefit on the new platform.

Whilst the features may be expensive, it's bleeding edge. This means that you get the newest socket, upgraded memory and a host of other features.

This is the cost of progress and is no different from the 680i motherboards a while back. When you think about that it should be clearer of just how much your getting for your money. I paid £250 for the Striker 2 years ago, the Asus P6T Deluxe certainly represents better value for money in my eyes. But then again that's purely based on the fact this this is bleeding edge hardware today.

Remove the SAS features and add 4 more run of the mill SATA ports and I'm sure this would be a more convincing option for everyone. Oh yeah and ditch the IDE port and add 2 IDE to SATA converters in the bundle and it would be an even better deal.

Not a bad motherboard, If I had not upgraded recently then this or the Gigabyte alternative would be mine.

 

Agreed on the costs still being absolute bollocks.

One major qualm I have to the layout is the IDE port. Seriously ASUS. Get rid of the stupid thing, and quit wasting our time with the shitty JMicron support.

If you're going to spend $1000 on a new machine, then whine about spending $20 on a new DVD Drive then you deserve to be hit with that same drive.

Mayhaps a better controller or two is in order, and the IDE replaced with another 4 SATA after the ICH ports are moved back into position.

Speaking of layout crimes - that's one ASUS is particularly good at. It's reasonable to assume that (almost) all of the ICH ports are going to the same place, so why do they keep insisting on splitting the damn things up, with a few angled, then a few flat?

 

There's no JMicron on the Asus, it's all Marvell.

Space, see IDE port placement.

And some people *might* want them facing outwards because it's easier to go up and down - some cases have the HDDs lower than the motherboard.

 

Ah they've actually gone wi

Wait what? The Marvell does E-Sata, SAS, and IDE? That's a fairly impressive chip. Though I still object to that far former port's existance.

 

No there are two Marvell chipsets - one for SAS only, and one for IDE and eSATA.

 

Im glad you didnt conclude its a load of rubbish as mines in the post.

 

That's exactly the point. It would boot really fast if it wasn't for the SAS controller loading BIOS and checking for nonexistent SAS drives every time. I'll try disabling it next time I reboot..