1 - Introduction

So as you've been able to read, our conclusion of the Intel reference X58 mainboard was a bit of a downer in some areas. On one hand an excellent product with intense system performance. Yet on the other hand, the motherboard lacked certain features and had a couple of design flaws. Luckily, Intel sells their chipset to other motherboard manufacturers and let's face it, a lot of them can and will do a far better job. One such party is ASUS. ASUS will release at least two mainboard series based on the Intel X58 chipset.

ASUS will offer an uber high-end 3-way SLI compatible Asus X58 Rampage II Extreme and also a 2-way SLI ready X58 based mainboard (check out our Multi-GPU vs Core i7 test where we tested it) that will still be very expensive yet slightly more affordable, known as the P6T Deluxe. Last week the P6T Deluxe mainboard entered our premises and we just had to show you this piece of gear.

So ASUS has sent us this early version of their X58 motherboard. Sexy looks, loads of features, heck this motherboard will support up to 24GB of DDR3-1333 memory, thanks to its six DIMM slots. It also has features like a Serial Attached SCSI controller to support higher-end SAS hard drives, known from the server industry for power users who desire nothing but the best performance.

Now we also had OCZ ship in some of their finest memory to support reviews like these, so they shipped out a slice or three of their OCZ PC3 16000 DDR3 memory. Then the guys from Noctua made sure we were able to keep the Core i7 965 processor nicely cooled down with their Noctua NH-C12P heatpipe cooler. These two products we'll also briefly look into with this article.

Now please understand, though lengthy, this is a bit of a quicky review. We had never planned to test this mainboard other then to use it for a Multi-GPU - X58 - Core i7 article planned for this week, and with all the Core i7 madness and X58 things going on, this review was a little side-dish as I just had to show you how incredible this little mainboard really is. See, everything that the reference X58 Intel mainboard lacked, this motherboard definitely has.

Next to that, it's just an amazing piece of machinery to look at. Nice black PCB, extravagant connectivity, SLI/Crossfire compatible, passively cooled. And if you opt for the P6T Deluxe OC Palm version, you'll even receive a little external LCD screen showing off the latest system info, widgets and overclocking tools at hand. Very cool...

Let's have a brief peek of what we assembled here for you today... and then head off into the review. Yeah, the pupils in your eyes just got a little bigger didn't they?