ASUS P6T7 WS Workstation X58 Core i7 SLI Crossfire Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2010-05-08
·
1,305 words · ~6 min read
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so today I'm going to be doing a quick unboxing of a very high-end board from
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ASUS now the Ws series of boards is a little bit different from their extreme
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Republic of Gamers branding so it's more of a workstation WS workstation oriented
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board but what you will find here is actually I'll wait till we get inside
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okay first of all let's tell you what it says on the front this is a core i7 or
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Zeon board so it's an LGA 1366 board it
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supports Tesla with Cuda of all things okay again a workstation feature it
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supports SLI and Crossfire X so it's perfectly gaming ready all right it has
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5,000 hour vrm blah blah blah 100%
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Japanese made Solid capacitors it has SAS on board again a very workstation
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oriented feature because you do need a SAS controller if you want to run, 1500
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15,000 RPM drives for example 16 plus 2phase power for your CPU epu 6 engine
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and seven Gen 2 PCI Express 16x slots
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that is what I was going to give away which is the the seven in the name but I
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guess they uh spoil the surprise on the front okay they have Express gate super
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Hybrid engine okay what do we got inside first
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we have support for three-way SLI and Crossfire best choice for intensive Cuda
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parallel Computing so those seven PCI Express slots you could theoretically
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install as many as seven single slot GTX 260s which do exist which would be a
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folding machine on a board like this okay so 16 plus2 face power sass on
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board okay this is all the same stuff from the front I'm not going to bother
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to list it again this is the same stuff
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from the front again thank you for that okay so let's have a look at the board
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itself in terms of accessories first so we've got one of those fire wire and USB
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2.0 combo back plates okay thank you for that then we have an SLI Bridge remember
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you don't need a crossfire bridge to come with your motherboard because it should come with your video cards then
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we have what is this I'm going to have to open this to find out what it is
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because I haven't seen this before okay it's some kind of small PCB
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okay oh cool all right neat okay so this
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has the onboard power and reset switches as well as a um a diagnostic LED display
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okay so I'm assuming that plugs in somewhere on the board and well I'll put
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that aside for now so that hopefully I can show you later where it plugs into
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then we have a three-way SLI Bridge hopefully you've seen one of those before you know what that looks like
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okay SATA cables we
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have six SATA cables three of which are right angle and three of which are
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straight then we have one Molex to two SATA power
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adapter then we have oh we've got a
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couple of those neat um okay so these are these are kind of
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these are SAS cables basically this is designed to be a more secure connector
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I've seen people use them for SATA as well because remember a SAS cable is
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pretty much the same thing as a SATA cable so it plugs right into both the
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power and the data and then off the back of it you've got the power cable and
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then a data cable so the whole thing is built into one unit supposedly makes it
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a little bit harder to dislodge then you got the assus Q connector okay most
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cases they come in blocks now anyway so it's not that big of a deal there's your
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IO Shield here is your users manual
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which is which is uncharacteristically thick you've also got your assus case
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badge as well as your driver DVD don't use this download the latest off the
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ASUS website all right here we've got a
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lot of information in probably a few different languages no it's wow it's all
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English check that out this is one thick
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all English manual that's impressive okay let's get the board itself out ooh
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this is very shiny I like it already all
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right there you go so like all LGA 1366
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boards this does support an LGA 136 CPU
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you've got a Lo socket there in case anyone cares uh there was some rumors
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going around about Lo sockets being Superior so ASUS has not skimped on the
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socket right off the you've got support for triple Channel
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DDR3 memory up to 24 gigs of memory serves then you have your power
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connector in its ideal location along the right hand edge of the board now
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these heat pipes I can't even begin to tell you exactly what they're cooling
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but I'm going to go ahead and start taking some guesses uh first of all I'm
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going to guess that this is cooling the power delivery mechanism for of the RAM
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okay so that heat pipe is coming out of the chipset area where I'm assuming
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they're using some some sort of PCI Bridge chips probably n f200 in order to
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provide all of these PCI Express Lanes because the x58 chipset does not support
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this many PCI Express Lanes natively okay so then moving on down the board
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we've got six SATA connectors which are
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powered from the x58 chipset as well as two SAS connectors which are powered off
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a third party chipset so you can see they're labeled here say to 1 2 3 4 5 6
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and SAS 1 and two then over here we have
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our seven PCI Express connectors now I
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haven't done my research ahead of time to be able to tell you which ones are
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running at which speed let's see if they've been nice and labeled them for
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me no they haven't so let's just assume they're all running at some kind of
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mixture of 16x and 8x down here we've
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got our USB headers as well as a fire wire header and front audio header then
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we have the cooling solution for is that
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even attached to anything oh yeah it is attached to something that's attached to
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a Marvel chipset okay and then it comes all the way up here and we have more
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cooling ra radiators for the voltage delivery system for the CPU then we have
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our 8 Pin power connector up at the top of the board exactly where it belongs
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top left and then let's move on to the aisle at the back so you got one of
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those PS2 keyboard mouse combo ports I love those then you have one 2 3 4 5 six
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USB 2.0 ports this is a bit of an older board so it doesn't have support for USB
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3.0 you have both uh coaxial and optical
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digital audio out 2 GB Lan 2 e sat which
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is is really nice to see and 7.1 audio on the back you've got your standard LGA
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1366 back plate and they've got the little stack cool 2 label here which is
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basically allowing the PCB to dissipate
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heat more effectively throughout Itself by using more copper so it's a way of
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keeping things a little bit cooler so thank you for checking out my unboxing
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of the ASUS p67 workstation
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supercomputer motherboard