Asus P6T Deluxe

Author: Richard Swinburne
Published: 2nd December 2008
Comments (28) Stumble

Board Layout Continued

The general component placement is excellent - the power sockets and pin-outs are in easily accessible places and despite the two outward facing SATA ports they are still usable when multi-GPU is fitted.

On that topic, the Asus P6T Deluxe supports both SLI and CrossFire with the latest drivers, although lacks 3-way SLI support, not that we care. If all three PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots are being used then the available bandwidth is x16. x8, x8.

The final x4 lanes available from the northbridge use the black, upper most, open-ended PCI-Express slot, and while long cards can still be used above the graphics card, being open-ended is completely useless since the northbridge heatsink sits right behind it. In addition to this a couple of PCI slots round things off, although the likelihood is only one will remain free when a graphics card is used.

Asus P6T Deluxe Board Layout Continued and Asus' TurboV Asus P6T Deluxe Board Layout Continued and Asus' TurboV
Asus P6T Deluxe Board Layout Continued and Asus' TurboV Asus P6T Deluxe Board Layout Continued and Asus' TurboV
Click to enlarge

The northbridge cooling is surprisingly meaty - the aluminium "Wind-Flow Heatpipe" is designed to guide air through it and Asus claims "Up to 10°C cooler under extreme overclocking," but cooler than what exactly? With its textured surface on the fins it looks great and is undeniably a hefty chunk of metal, although we think it's as much for show as performance as it's not exactly of high surface area. However, the copper core/base with aluminium fins is a renowned combination that works very well.

The other plus is that it's removable too, exposing a flat copper block underneath that guides the heatpipes through. This offers the option of handling alternative coolers, providing the screw width is correct.

Asus P6T Deluxe Board Layout Continued and Asus' TurboV Asus P6T Deluxe Board Layout Continued and Asus' TurboV
Click to enlarge

Asus includes both backlit power and reset buttons, but fails to do the reset CMOS as well. In fact, clearing the CMOS is a sheer pain in the backside - first to find the jumper (it's right in the bottom corner, above the front panel pin-out and below a cluster of three), then to swap it over while it's among a cluster of cables.

That said, the extreme overvolt jumpers for QPI and memory that are in amongst these (and the CPU by its socket) are a great part of Asus boards. They please both extreme overclockers while keeping normal users safer from silly high upper voltage boundaries that you'd never use without sub-zero cooling.

Asus P6T Deluxe Board Layout Continued and Asus' TurboV Asus P6T Deluxe Board Layout Continued and Asus' TurboV
Click to enlarge

TurboV and Fan Xpert

The TurboV overclocking utility is incredibly easy to use with the simple slider bars and if you're new to overclocking it's extremely simple to just whip up the sliders and apply the new frequency and voltage settings. The slider bars voltage adjustments can be changed in very acute 0.00625V to 0.02V increments, all the important voltages are listed and there's even profile saving support to store an overclock. It's missing memory timings and memory frequencies although these are harder to change without a restart though. Ideally it should be used with the AI Suite, or even better, CPU-Z, to check the QPI, memory and CPU frequencies because there's no way to tell with TurboV itself.

Asus P6T Deluxe Board Layout Continued and Asus' TurboV Asus P6T Deluxe Board Layout Continued and Asus' TurboV
Click to enlarge

Like all Windows OC utilities though it lacks stability when you really push it, and it particularly doesn't like it when the EPU-6 engine service is running in the background. If you've installed it previous it'll likely run in the background automatically and the only way to stop it is to kill the service by running task manager - this isn't a TurboV issue exactly, it's just Asus needs to sort its software out.

Even then, despite having plenty of success with this software back in September with early Core i7 samples, we're trying to use it now and are not seeing the same results with a Core i7 920 from settings we know that work in the BIOS. Basically it's good, but you'll probably find you've outgrown it relatively quickly.

When available (i.e. not when you're using the EPU-6 engine), the FanXpert has some nice features too, allowing complete customisation of the CPU fan speed-noise-performance curve according to the temperature of the CPU. It does however, need a 4-pin PWM fan, which is doesn't tell you but you can see by the calibration above that a simple 3-pin doesn't work (we had no 4-pins to hand). The system fans don't get the customisable options, and instead get a few simpler options instead. Again, a really nice idea and probably second to Abit's old uGuru software, but we want to see it expanded upon!

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