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Best Motherboard For I7 - ASUS P6X58D Premium review

The P6X58D Premium is the latest from Asus LGA1366 motherboards since the introduction of the Rampage III Extreme. This motherboard is loaded with the famous X58 chipset on the Northbridge and the ICH10R on the Southbridge. It has three PCI-E 16X slot, one PCI slot and one PCI-E 1X. The first two has 16 lanes and the third one (white) can be either eight or single line. This board has six DDR3 slot triple channel 2000MHz that supports up to 24GB memory with 8 SATA ports that supports the 3Gbps and 6Gbps. It has two USB 3.0 port and Eight USB 2.0. This board also supports the 3-way SLI and CrossfireX GPU.

Testing Setup

The board was tested with an Intel Core i7 980X 3.33 MHz Extreme Edition processor and overclocked at 4.4 MHz.  It uses a 24GB 1600MHz triple channel DDR3 memory, Seagate 7200 RPM 1TB SATA, 750 watts power supply, an ATI Radeon 5870 1GB graphics card and Windows 7 64-bit.

Overclocking The P6X58D Premium

The P6X58D Premium is easy to overclock because its settings are mostly accessible into a single menu all voltages and frequencies can be varied directly. The best overclocked frequency for this board is at 215 MHz QPI team up with Core i7 980X Extreme Edition.

This board was overclocked at frequency of 200MHz X22 multiplier and runs at 4.4MHz. The overall Media Benchmark score is up to 2,578 quite impressive. The over clocked frame rate in Crysis is at 33fps.

The overall score is based on the average of the image editing, video encoding and multi-tasking tests. Testing for this benchmark is how actually the computer was used in the real world. The suite comprising of an image editing test using Gimp, Video encoding test using Handbrake and a multi tasking test using 7 – Zip to archived and encrypt the large batch of files while the HD movie plays in mplayer. For Crysis game, the settings are all high with a resolution of 1680 X 1050.

Conclusion

The ASUS P6X58D premium proves that it is a good choice for Core i7 Processor and great for gaming. More overclocking possibilities and if you load it up with Core i7 920 – 950(much cheaper than Core i7 980X EE) you can go far more with speed. ASUS motherboards are very dependable and if you're an ASUS fan go for it. Discover more reviews of the Best Motherboards for intel and AMD processors.

 

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Does anyone know about RAID, SLI, and Core i7?

What is better to use.. the motherboards RAID if possible, or is PCI raid better?

What steps do you need to take to set up a motherboard RAID for the OS compared to setting up a PCI raid?

Is it possible to set up RAID 0 and 1 with 3 hard drives so you can have the speed but also the security if one of them fail?

If so how?

What is better 3 GTX 285's on 3 way SLI or 2 GTX295's on 2 way SLI?

Are there any extra steps you need to take to install SLI or do you just insert all the cards you need then use the SLI bridge? I have never done it before..

Is there anything I need to know about installing a Core i7 compared to older processors like a Pentium 4? I heard they are Pinless?

THANKS! =]

VERY much appreciated. =]

>> What is better to use.. the motherboards RAID if possible, or is PCI raid better?

Modern motherboard RAID is superior to a PCI raid card... however, I assume you mean the legacy PCI slots. If you're talking PCI Express, then they would be superior. In some cases, to put certain Flash drives in RAID, you might even require the bandwidth of PCIe x4 to get the best results.

>> What steps do you need to take to set up a motherboard RAID for the OS compared to setting up a PCI raid?

The steps are very similar when you excluded the fact that you have to connect the expansion card to the motherboard. Just connect the drives to the RAID card, install the drivers, run the setup utility, etc... it's all explained in documentation.

>> Is it possible to set up RAID 0 and 1 with 3 hard drives so you can have the speed but also the security if one of them fail?
If so how?

You're talking about RAID 1+0 or (even better in my opinion) RAID 5. Google that.

What is better 3 GTX 285's on 3 way SLI or 2 GTX295's on 2 way SLI?

> I haven't seen any benchmark comparisons, but this shouldn't be hard to google. I'm sure one of the popular benchmarking sites have done this. My guess however would be that the 3-way 285s would be superior. However, they both sound like a waste of money.

Are there any extra steps you need to take to install SLI or do you just insert all the cards you need then use the SLI bridge? I have never done it before..

>> Aside from installed SLI drivers and using the nVidia utility to adjust the settings, that's it. It's not nearly as complicated as it seems.

Is there anything I need to know about installing a Core i7 compared to older processors like a Pentium 4? I heard they are Pinless?

> Pinless? No, they're not pinless, and I'm not sure what you're referring to when you say this. They definitely have pins, but there might be something going on there that might spark a concept by that name. Not much to understand about them other than they're multi-core and are capable of hyper-threading. They currently have the best architecture of any retail processor available today and they use a completely different bridge architecture from previous Intel generations. They use a direct path to the RAM similar to the way AMD processors work.

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