Rear I/O

The P6T Deluxe rear I/O includes:

• Eight USB 2.0 ports
  
• PS2 keyboard or mouse
  
• Optical and RCA digital S/PDIF out
  
• One 6-pin Firewire socket
  
• One eSATA port
  
• Two RJ45 Ethernet sockets
  
• Six 3.5mm analogue audio jacks providing 7.1 channel High-Definition audio, as well as line-in and microphone inputs.

Asus manages to cram in everything but the kitchen sink onto the rear I/O. The oodles of USB will have plenty of our readers in fits of happy, and there's basically at least one of everything else bar digital S/PDIF input, but that's not ever a primary need.

The PS2 connector can take keyboard or mouse - useful for some legacy input, especially PS2 keyboard for BIOS support. All in all, Asus is onto a winner here.

BIOS

As usual with Asus' BIOS, it's very easy to use and understand. The AI Tweaker section is where it happens and while it takes some getting used to if you're upgrading from Core 2, because of the loss of front side bus and chipset straps. This has been is replaced by the main CPU settings at the top - there's the option for Intel XMP, DOCP which offers additional memory pre-sets, as well as manually configuring everything.

The memory timing controls are located in a sub-menu and are split into three sets of options that any memory tweaker should be familiar with. We're glad Asus has finally put all this in a sub-menu because the data list is long and it makes changing the voltages and clock speeds a lot quicker than scrolling all the way down.

The voltage adjustments are particularly fine without being silly, and instead of scrolling through an entire list can be typed straight in. Unlike Gigabyte boards though which need an exact matching value, the Asus P6T just finds the closest value which is far better. DRAM reference voltages are included for not only each channel, but can be different for data and control too. We would like to suggest Asus re-labels the "QPI/DRAM Voltage" option to include "CPU Uncore" as well, so not to confuse it with the actual DRAM voltage.

ACPI 2.0 is not on by default, and it should be, while the fan control options in the hardware monitor are very limited at best.

Under the tools directory, there's the ever useful Asus EZ Flash 2 that we couldn't live without, and Express Gate SSD boot configuration can also be set up here. The OC Profile that saves BIOS settings is still limited to just two available profile slots, but at least now they can be renamed so you know what they are.