Intel X58 Extreme DX58SO Motherboard

Intel’s recent launch of the X58 chipset has led to many reviews praising the new chipset and CPU as being the fastest available to the consumer right now. Intel has the entire high end covered with the under $300 Core i7 920, the $500+ Core i7 940 and the $999 Core i7 965 XE. Intel sells their chipsets at a retail price of nearly the same as the CPUs meaning that a new system based upon the new CPU will cost over $1000 when you add in the cost of memory and hard drives and other components.

AMD has a hard time competing as their CPUs are not competitive with the latest offerings from Intel. I’ve reviewed motherboards from ASUS, ECS, and MSI based upon this chipset but what about the reference board from Intel? Intel generally makes good stable reference boards leaving the tweaking to the other board manufacturers based upon their reference design. Intel has tried to shake the feeling by releasing tweaked boards like the X48 Bonetrail 2 reference design. Last month they released the X58 chipset with the codename Smackover. The reference board is called the DX58SO and is on the review bench today.

ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution Review :: ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution Layout

The CPU area of the board is clear of obstacles with rows of Japan-made Solid Capacitors along all four sides of the CPU Socket. Note that these capacitors will not leak as some motherboard capacitors tend to do and have a life of around 50000 hours. ASUS says that they have a full 16+2 phase VRM design with 16 phases to the vCore 2 phases to Vdram/QPI controller. The CPU Socket itself is the standard LGA-1366 Socket.

Under the CPU socket is the memory slots. ASUS outfits this board with 6 DIMM slots, allowing for up to 12GB of Triple Channel DDR3-1600MHz memory. Note that the maximum memory speed officially supported by the Core i7 CPUs is 1333MHz, but DDR3-1600MHz is supported through overclocking. The P6T6 WS Revolution supports a QPI of 6.4GT/second, when a 965 XE CPU is installed. Next to the CPU Socket on the right hand side is the MOSFET heatsinks.

ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution

The economic crisis has caused computer companies to change their modus operandi and plans for the upcoming year. Intel has just canceled their Havendale CPU that was supposed to be their first generation of CPU with a GPU integrated on the CPU. This means that the mainstream version of the Core i7 CPUs will likely have to wait for a while until next year. Intel has released the Core i7 CPUs and the X58 chipset to support the new CPUs and it is this chipset which will be their main thrust for the high-end this year.

ASUS has long been known the world over as the preferred motherboard maker of choice among enthusiasts. Doc usually uses their motherboards in his personal computer as do I, and their boards usually have a comprehensive set of features, highest performance in the board's class, and good overclocking headroom that is hard to beat from other manufacturers. Today the ASUS P6T6 WS Workstation motherboard is on the test bench. This board has a lot of unique features that should satisfy the enthusiast in all of us and make waves in the X58 motherboard scene.

ASRock X58 SuperComputer Motherboard

Starting from the CPU Socket the LGA-1366 Socket is facing towards the left side of the board which is normal for the new interface. The CPU area is clear of obstacles with two rows of low-h capacitors on the left hand side of the socket and the bottom of the socket. The Northbridge is covered by a heatsink with a heat pipe going to a heatsink that covers the MOSFETs. The Southbridge is covered by another heatsink but is not connected to the NB by heat pipe.

There are six DIMM Sockets on the board that take either ECC or non-ECC DDR3 memory. One thing that should be noted is that the memory controller is on the CPU and only DDR3-1066MHz is supported officially supported. XMP memory is supported for the higher clocked profiles when the memory is installed. To install three DIMMs in Triple Channel Memory mode you need to install the memory in the white memory slots.

ASRock X58 SuperComputer Motherboard Review

The name SuperComputer comes from the ability of this board to have up to three NVIDIA Tesla video cards installed at the same time along with a Quadro card to handle the display output. NVIDIA has a single configuration of Tesla card, the C1060. This card has 240 processing cores, 4GB of GDDR3 memory and 933GFLOP/s of processor power. The card is limited to Windows XP and Linux and as the card does not have external connectors requires another solution like the Quadro video card to provide video.

The idea of turning a mainstream motherboard into a workstation board is not a new one. ASRock adds support for the upcoming Intel Xeon 3500 series CPUs on this motherboard. The new Xeon processors are based upon the same Newhalem core as the Core i7 CPUs and should work with other X58 motherboards as well. The X58 Supercomputer also supports the Core i7 CPUs and the maximum QPI of 6.4GT/second. The memory controller has been moved to the CPU from the Southbridge matching AMD's move years ago.

ASRock X58 SuperComputer Motherboard Review

Intel's X58 chipset has been a wide success among the early adopters of the Core i7 platform. As they are the only provider of chipsets for the Newhalem CPUs this comes as no surprise. The Core i7 offers improved performance, more features and the memory controller moved to the CPU instead of the chipset over the previous generation CPUs. Every major motherboard manufacturer has released boards on this chipset.

ASRock is a company best known for producing unique motherboards with features like DDR2 and DDR3 on the same board, support for Crossfire and SLI on the same non-X58 board, and many other features that other companies don't offer on their motherboards. Established in 2002, ASRock targets the mainstream segment with the design concept of 3C: Creative, Considerate and Cost-effective. Their products have been relegated to the inexpensive portion of the market for the most part. Today I'm reviewing the ASRock X58 SuperComputer motherboard.

Intel D850GB P4 Motherboard

Intel are known more for their line of incredibly successful processors than their motherboards, but if the D850GB is any indication, they can definitely hold their own with the likes of motherboard companies such as MSI. The D850GB is a Pentium 4 socket 423 motherboard built around the well performing and stable i850 Tehama chipset and supports the classic 5 PCI and 1 AGP configuration.

With dual RDRAM channels supporting up to 2.0GB of RIMM memory the D850GB offers the performance or workstation user the expandability for true expansive use. Individuals interested in doing a little overclocking on the side will find little to no tweaking tool with this motherboard - this is Intel after all. During our tests we found the board to live up to its expectations in terms of reliability, and even managed to surprise us with its performance abilities.