Though the P6T Deluxe OC Palm edition is Asus’s first board supporting Intel’s new Core i7 processor, its design is anything but conservative. Where Intel’s DX58SO board supports overclocking, the P6T Deluxe invites it out for dinner and a movie. Add in tons of expandability, both SLI and CrossFireX support, and the unique OC Palm external display, and the P6T is an excellent foundation for a high-performance Core i7 system.
The P6T Deluxe is based on Intel’s X58 chipset. It uses the new LGA1366 socket, allowing you to install the standard Core i7 CPU or the Extreme Edition. Gamers will be pleased that the board supports both Nvidia's SLI and AMD's CrossFireX for using up to three graphics cards together, so they’re no longer tied to one brand or the other. (Not all X58 boards support SLI, as Nvidia requires board manufacturers to pay a licensing fee.) An unusual feature is the presence of a whopping six memory slots, allowing you to add memory in sets of three to take advantage of the Core i7’s increased bandwidth with triple-channel memory.
As you’d expect from an Asus enthusiast board, the P6T Deluxe’s BIOS has detailed overclocking features for adjusting a wide variety of CPU and memory timings and voltages. The BIOS has settings for memory speeds up to 1,600MHz with standard Core i7s, or up to 2,000MHz with the Extreme Edition. The board also includes TurboV software, which lets you adjust a number of speed and voltage settings on the fly from within Windows.
We tested the board with the entry-level Core i7 920. By pairing this $284 CPU with OCZ’s new DDR3 PC3-10666 Platinum Low-Voltage Triple Channel Memory Kit, which supports 1,333MHz speeds with low latency, we were able to match the performance of the $999 Core i7 965 Extreme Edition in most of our tests. The RAM’s extra speed headroom over 1,066MHz memory let us easily push the 2.66GHz Core i7 920 to 3.34GHz by upping the basic system bus speed from 133MHz to 166MHz. The P6T made the overclocking easy, with no need to adjust CPU voltages.
The “OC Palm” in the name refers to a small USB device with a color LCD, directional pad, and a few buttons. You can pick up the OC Palm and adjust the TurboV overclocking settings, allowing you to push the system a little faster from inside games or other applications. You can also use it to monitor temperatures and voltages, or to view Yahoo Widgets.
The P6T Deluxe includes the Asus EPU energy-management feature, which lets you reduce voltage to a variety of components to save power, either manually or automatically based on load. Unfortunately, the EPU features only work when you’re running at stock clock speeds. That’s disappointing, given how many of this board’s features are geared toward overclocking.
Designed with enthusiasts in mind, the board features onboard power and reset switches, so you can set it up and power it on without connecting the front panel of a PC case. We would have liked to see a button to clear the BIOS settings; the board uses a traditional jumper.
The P6T Deluxe is loaded with ports. There are eight USB connectors on the back panel, connectors for six more on the motherboard, as well as dual Gigabit Ethernet ports and a pair of FireWire connectors. On the storage front, you’ll find six Serial ATA (SATA) ports, one external SATA (eSATA) connector, and two Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) ports that support either SAS or SATA drives. The P6T Deluxe has onboard eight-channel audio with analog and digital outputs. Despite all this, Asus still managed to fit legacy ports on the board, with an IDE drive connector, a floppy port, and a single PS/2 mouse/keyboard connector. On the expansion-slot front, you’ll find three PCI Express (PCIe) x16 slots, one PCIe x4 slot, and a pair of PCI slots.
For such a full-featured board, particularly one featuring six RAM slots, the layout is comfortable to work with. The chipset heat sinks are fairly low-profile and shouldn’t cause any conflicts with large CPU coolers. The second and third PCIe x16 slots are adjacent to each other, however, so you can’t install three double-width graphics cards together. For a three-card setup, at least two cards will have to be single-slot models. You can use a pair of wide cards, such as two GeForce GTX 280s or a pair of Radeon HD 4870 X2s.
The P6T Deluxe is an excellent foundation for a high-performance Core i7 system. We wish we could shift to power-saving mode without having to first manually disable overclocking, but that’s about the only nit we have to pick with this powerful, stable board. It has something for everyone: Gamers will appreciate the ability to choose SLI or CrossFireX, performance-minded tweakers will find tons of settings to play with, and people who leave their PCs on 24/7 will appreciate the power-saving features.
