On the specifications table, for the P6T "Storage IO" you write "2 channels 300MB/s Serial ATA with RAID 0, 1 support via Marvell 88SE6320" This should read "2 x SAS ports supporting SAS RAID 0 and 1".

In response to mjw, 15K SAS drives offer a major improvement in throughput and access times. However, when a SATA drive is used on a SAS controller, some loss in performance is to be expected.

What no AGP slot? I see plenty of PCI slots on these motherboards. I thought it would be all PCI-E at this point.

I mean from what I have seen from all the X58 mobos coming out is if you have 2 video cards with the blower fan type cooler 1x PCI-E NIC and a 1x PCI-E sound card ,you're screwed.

These are workstation (and, eventually, DP server) CPUs being sold initially as "enthusiast" chips, so it's not surprising the motherboards are suitably expensive.

I have to hand it to Intel, getting enthusiasts to pay top dollar for the privilege of doing the final validation pass on their workstation/small server hardware

Given that the throughput of the SAS controller seems to be lower than the SATA controller, is there any benefit in using SAS (e.g. 15K rpm) disks with the ASUS? Would they just end up costing more than 10K rpm velociraptor and perform worse as well? Thanks for your opinion.

Ahh..soon we will have the dual socket motherboard releases. Than I can finally upgrade my Opteron system. Shweet!

holy crap!

these mobos cost as much as server boards!

Intel manufactures the X58 IOH using 130nm process technology that feels a little antiquated given the company's fabrication prowess. After all, AMD has been building north bridge chips on a power-efficient 55nm node since March.

And Intel's been making the 65 nm 4-series chipsets (aside from the X48 = X38) for months now. For comparison, the last Intel chipsets to be built on 130 nm were the 94x "Lakeport"/"Calistoga" and 975X "Glenwood" chipsets. (Yes, including the Atom's 945GC and 945GSE/945GMS core logic.) 965 and the 3-series were 90 nm.

The last ingredient in the X58's connectivity soup is Intel's DMI interconnect. This link offers up to 2GB/s of bandwidth, which seems a little light given the massive pipes seen elsewhere in the Core i7. However, DMI does allow the X58 to hook into Intel's existing ICH10 series south bridge chips.

Well, that's about as much as a PCI Express 2.0 x4 or a PCI Express 1.1 x8 link, which isn't really that bad at all.

I suspect our inability to lower the PQI speed may have held the board back. [...] The Deluxe had no problems running a 4.8GT/s PQI link, and it recovered nicely when pushed beyond the brink, automatically rebooting into the BIOS after a failed overclocking attempt.

Was ist PQI? QPI, perhaps?

Also, I should hope the P6T'd have no problems running a 4.8 GT/s QPI link, given that's stock for the Core i7 9x0 processors. Your screenshot says 3.6 GHz i.e. 7.2 GT/s; is that what you meant?

I know it may be a lot to ask, but could you possibly do a head to head of the X58 offerings from EVGA (FTW edition), ASUS (Rampage II Extreme) and Gigabyte (GA-EX58-UD5)? Prices would also be greatly appreciated when going through the gamut of X58 boards. So far great coverage. :D

If I'm paying a kilobuck for the mill, I'm not complaining about the markup on the mobo. If an extra hundy means it won't melt when I'm buzzing the memory at 1600 MHz, it's worth it.

It's ironic that X58 mobos cost so much considering that the "northbridge" on the motherboard is essentially just a glorified electric router -_-.

The intel DX58SO is a no show for me (surprise surprise), with overclocking features that don't work, and zero effective headroom (not to mention lack of SLI support).

The ASUS P6T is a more interesting picture, but still critically flawed in my book. The superfluous heatpipe arrangement eats up a whole expansion slot (have you seen how *thick* those fins are? They're more ornamental than utilitarian), and the PCIEx16 slot placement leaves a lot to be desired (as mentioned in the review). The layout on the RoG board is better, but at its ludicrously inflated pricepoint, is a no-go.

130nm? Multi chip solutions? Blegh.

I sincerely hope nvidia gets its QPI license sorted out so we can see some real competition and innovation in the LGA-1366 space. They're really been on a roll with their chipsets lately, even if this means precluding CF (which, as a 4850 owner, makes me sad).

Those are high prices. Two thumbs up for SAS on the Asus.

I can't see spending much more than $100 for a mobo these days. The $100 mobos get so much right, and still leave you with money in your pocket to spend on other things. But there are lots of people out there that have either more money or fewer expenses than I do, so these boards' prices might be a-o-k for them.

Looks promising, to bad this stuff is crazy money at the minute. Hopefully there'll be some value to be had early next year.

Thanks for this, it's a real-world test that is nice to see:

Curious to see whether the performance gap between the boards persisted with more realistic settings, I cranked Quake Wars and Episode Two up to 1920x1200 with 4X antialiasing and 16X anisotropic filtering, and maxed out all the in-game detail levels. These settings yielded frame rates in the 60 FPS range, with less than one frame per second separating the Asus and Intel boards in each game. As far as gaming in the real world goes, then, these boards look evenly matched.

Now we just need to see real-world graphics settings with different CPU speeds :)

Also, the max base clock is good to know for overclocking but does it always translate in to higher useful final CPU speed? I know that's going to depend a lot upon the CPU sample but it would be good to know where the limitations of the platform are, for example it would be useful to know if a higher base clock is somehow less stable than a lower one at the same final CPU speed.

Also, typo on pg 9 in the Overclocking section - PQI instead of QPI.

I want an ASUS high-end shootout -- Compare the P6T [the top of the line Mercedes sedan] vs. the Rampage II Extreme [the Ferrari]. Please make it so!

So, you can review the motherboards with the Core i7 chips in them BUT you can't review the Core i7 chips yet?

The boards cost as much as a quality DDR3 X48 board, plus a little for being new. No surprise, we expected $250-350 to be the stree prices for X58 boards.

Also, I want to see the P6T compared with the X58-DS4 board, since those are the two Im likely to seriously consider on launch day.

About 15-20% performance gain across the board with some very big outliers.

Word to the wise, you can compare some scores from across different reviews on TR to see a preview of Core i7's performance.