ASUS P6X58D-E Review
P6X58D-E Close-up
Published: 24th May 2010 | Source: ASUS | Price: £170.57 |
Close Up
Yes, you are still in the right review, and yes this is an ASUS board. It's a shock to see a baby blue box when we opened the parcel. You get used to how a company do something and then they throw you a curve ball. It looks nice though although the rear of the box is a bit busier than we're used to seeing. A little budget tweak on the box design then.
Internally we definitely see where some of the savings are. No stiff black boxes with lots of goodies here. More the standard bit of cardboard keeping the accessories off of the motherboard.
Speaking of accessories they're sparse. We've got everything we need but it's not exactly inspiring. Being hyper critical it would have been nice to see blue SATA cables to go along with the board, or even four blue and two white to make it easier to determine what's plugged in where.
Onto the board itself we can see it's a very standard layout. One nice thing is that ASUS have given us a lot of room to the right of the CPU socket for those oversized coolers that seem to be everwhere.
The first big area that is different to the Premium version is around the CPU. Firstly the X58 chipset cooler has only a single heatpipe out of it, rather than one leading to the southbridge. Considering how small the southbridge cooler is it's an area we'd like to have seen either the heatpipe retained or a large southbridge cooler installed. The other is that the heatsink to the north of the CPU socket, to the right on this picture, is also flying solo and not part of the cooling solution.
PCI slot wise we have three PCIe sockets running at 16/16/1 or 16/8/8. Two legacy PCI sockets, the uppermost of which is almost useless with todays large graphics coolers, and a single PCIe x1 port.
In terms of interface we have two internal USB ports, 6 SATAII ports, two SATA6Gb/s ports (the white ones) and the front-panel headers.
On the rear are the usual PS2 port, USB3.0, SPDIF, USB2.0, Firewire, USB2.0 and LAN, along with the outputs for the Realtek ALC889.
Most Recent Comments
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Originally Posted by name='GrimReaper'
Nice board! how much does it retail for?
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