so today I'll be doing a quick unboxing of a board from ASUS this is the p6x 58d
E so let's get quickly zoomed in here
and I've got my camera propped on my makeshift cardboard cat tree which my
cat is now exploring this may end badly
if I do not end the video now no he's leaving the camera alone that works okay
so this is part of their updated x58 board so you can tell because there's a
d at the end that stands for USB 3.
which they are calling out here as true USB 3.0 as well as true SATA 6 GB perss
so then we've also got support for 16 plus 2phase power as well as SLI and
Crossfire it is an LGA 1366 motherboard
so that means you've got support for all Intel's core i7 and core i7 extreme CPUs
on that socket and then you can see this is also an extreme design board so that
means that isus is going for number one reliability performance and safety here
let's move around to the back of the board now true USB 3.0 and true SATA 6
GB pers second ASUS is calling that out because of the unique way that they have
uh been able to deliver the bandwidth required by those Technologies now ASUS
uses a uh a chip to split the PCI eanes
to make sure that even if you're running SLI or Crossfire they will get
all the bandwidth that they need so three-way SLI quad GPU Crossfire X
that's all good and fine 100% long life
solid capacitors they've also got their stat cool 3 plus technology stat cool
just means lots of copper in the PCB allows it to dissipate heat more easily
and they're calling it a unique layout I guess we'll have to have a look and see what I think of their unique layout as
well as Precision tweaker 2 software so let's get the board opened up here and
you can see that once I remove the outer sleeve it looks exactly the same cool
okay moving my mouse out of the way turn my monitor off here let's get this board
opened up and have a look at the accessories that are included the cat is
eating Jonathan fatality Wendell's RAM
so I'm going to go ahead and move that out of his way okay first of all we have
an IO Shield it uses ASUS's puffy shiny
back but it is not color coded next we have the users guide which also has a
driver and utilities DVD in here don't use this download the latest off the
assus website there's also a little powered by AE sticker very nice okay the
manual itself is in uh all English so it's quite a thick
manual it gives you some details on the bio some details on the physical layout
of your board all of that good stuff now I may have actually made a mistake when
I said um that they needed a bridge chip to get full USB 3.0 and sta 6 gbit per
second so I'm going to correct myself now that's only on ASUS's p55 boards not
on their x58 boards with x58 there are more PCIe lanes and it is not necessary
so in the as far as the SATA cables go ASUS is included four SATA 2 cables okay
so two of them are right angle and two of them are straight connector and then
they've also included two uh SATA 6
gabit per second cables now I use the finger quotes because really they're
exactly the same thing but these ones are white and black and all cool looking
so I would use those if it was up to me next we have a three-way SLI Bridge as
well as a regular flexible SLI bridge
then we've also got an empty baggie
which probably contained a 3-way SLI bridge at some point but I guess it came
out during shipping just goes to show you shipping like anything can happen in
shipping I've seen some weird stuff okay and then we have their Q connector so if
you can you can hook up your front panel connectors as well as your USB to those
and then plug those right into the motherboard now let's get the board
out and see what we have in store here
so I'm just going to close this box so that I can uh get a good look at this
for you here all right let's get the baggie
open I love motherboards because the way
they package it makes it really easy for me to remove it from the BLX it's very
nice there's no seals no nothing it's all very very simple that way okay so
let's have a look at the layout of this board first of all in the very center I'm just going to zoom in a touch here
for you so that you can see a little bit better almost as well as I can all right
there we go so in the center we will find our LGA 1366 socket it is is a Loz
socket not a foxcon socket for those of you who care unless you know what I'm
referring to you probably don't care so don't worry about it we've got nice
beefy looking vrm coolers here I mean they're not huge but what they are is
they're efficient looking so they're just a simple fin design on both sides
okay so you can see this one's actually attached via a heat pipe to the North
Bridge cooler here and then there is no heat pipe moving over to the South
Bridge but that's not really necessary the South Bridge here the I10 R does not
put out a whole lot of heat next of all we have the 8 Pin uh CPU power connector
up at its ideal location at the top left then we have support for triple Channel
DDR3 memory populate the blue slots first now this is actually something
that I've never mentioned before although it's present on uh as far as I
know every x58 board the primary channels that you're going to populate
are always the ones that are further away from the CPU and the reason for
that is because there are many large CPU coolers these days
and most customers only buy one triple Channel kit in the lifetime of the board
so the manufacturers have cleverly made the primary channels the ones further
away so it gives you that one extra slot if you have high-profile memory that you
can use to populate that space with your cooler so there you go there's your
tidbit for the day we have a memo button here so that means that it'll set any
memory in here to very very default
timing so that you can make sure you can post even with high performance sticks
uh here we've got a oh we've got standard RAM Clips that's interesting so
normally on ausa's boards they have only a one-sided RAM clip but it looks like
we've actually got Clips on both sides on this board not sure why they've made
that change we've got a 24 pin power connector in its ideal location along
the right hand edge of the board and moving down the board we have the
Southbridge stream phase then we oh okay here we go here it gets gets more
interesting again so the top ones the two gray ports here those are say to 6
gbit per second running off of a Marvel
chipset here these two right here the powder blue ones are a
SATA oh man sorry my cats are playing
with the bag and they're probably going to destroy it anyway okay so these are
SATA 2 next we have overvolt Dam bus and
overw qpi dram jumpers so I wish I knew
exactly what those are please leave a comment if you know exactly what those jumpers are for then down here at the
bottom we've got two more SATA two ports here we have our front panel connectors
and then we've got a couple of USB 2.0 front headers and then moving right
along we've got an onboard power switch that's the biggest one I mean a lot of
Manufacturers include like onboard power onboard uh speaker onboard reset but the
power is the big one I do like seeing an onboard seos clear but that one's
actually on the back IO Shield of this board so that's even better okay so PCI
Express slot layout first of all we've got our two PCI e6x slots these are
going to be our two blue primary ones and if you populate both of those with a
dual slot graphics card you will be left with one PCIe 16x slot and one PCIe 1X
slot I don't mind seeing both of the PCI slots covered on a board like this
because let's face it if you're buying a high-end x58 board you're loading in two
graphics cards you don't need PCI slots you should probably have PCIe updated
PCIe addin cards so that brings us right
around to the very back of the board where we've got our IO Shield so you got
two PS2 ports you know I'm still not done with PS2 personally I find that
when you're trying to get into the BIOS or sometimes when you're installing applications USB keyboards don't always
get recognized I love having PS2 ports available to me then we have a clear SEO
switch right here two USB 3.0 ports optical audio out coax seal audio out
digital both then we have four USB 2.0 ports one fire wire Port gigabit
Ethernet and 7.1 audio so thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look
at the p6x 58d
e motherboard