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The Board

The Asus P6T Deluxe OC Palm Edition looks like what it is: a serious high end enthusiasts' board.

You can see the care taken by Asus engineers - the copper heat pipes and heat sinks, the many solid state capacitors, the on-board power and reset switches along with extensive expansion capabilities shout that this is a serious piece of equipment.

I am still getting used to Socket 1366 - it is attached quite securely to the board and the plate underneath. As an aside, I wonder why Asus chose to paint the heatsinks -- I like the bare metal look better.

Note the six DIMM sockets - unlike the Intel DX58SO you can put two modules in every channel.

I like having the six SATA and two SAS connectors, and the IDE connector does not hurt - however I wish six of the connectors were not the right angle ones; I find those a pain to use once the board is installed in a case. I also think it would have been better to separate the orange SAS connectors from the SATA; as the way it is now, it would be easy to mistakenly plug a SATA cable into it a SAS connector.

The Asus P6T Deluxe has many expansion slots:

• PICe 4x
• two PCI slots
• one PCIe 16x slot
• two additional PCIe slots that can be used as one 16x plus one 1x or two 8x slots

And a lot of USB and FireWire headers too!

Here you can see the power and reset switches, along with overvoltage jumpers:

There are eight white LED's there as you can see - however the BIOS does not seem to use them for POST information. Pity.

Here is the back panel:

• eight USB2.0 connectors
• optical/coax SP/DIFF
• FireWire
• eSATA
• a PS/2 keyboard or mouse connector
• two Gigabit Ethernet connectors
• six analog audio connectors

Here is the bundle you get with the board: plenty of cables, the OC Palm device, two I/O brackets for more USB/FireWire ports, manual and driver disk.