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Overclocking

The Asus P6T Deluxe overclocked reasonably well - it reached 3.66GHz with a BCLK limit of 173MHz. No matter what I tried, I could not get it stable at higher speeds, however I had no way of tweaking the QPI data rate, which may have been the limiting factor.

To reach 3.63GHz I did the following:

• upped Vcore to 1.45V
• changed BCLK to 173MHz
• dropped the memory multiplier to 6X by choosing the "800MHz" setting

One bit of unexpected good news was that the Quimonda memory ran at 1038-6-6-6-18-1T on this board resulting in excellent latencies.

The Intel DX58SO was only able to reach a BCLK of 174MHz, so it only had a tiny lead in some overclocked benchmarks, however as the MSI Eclipse reached a whopping 195MHz for BCLK it basically crushed both the Intel and Asus boards for the overclocked results.

Power Consumption

At stock, both the MSI Eclipse and Intel DX58SO used a little less power than the Asus P6T Deluxe, however when overclocked, the Asus P6T Deluxe ended up in the middle of the x58 pack.

Conclusion

The Asus P6T Deluxe is a really nice motherboard - I became quite fond of the OC Palm device, and it consistently had the best stock clock speed results of the three X58 boards I've reviewed so far.

I liked the feature set of the board - I was especially impressed with the inclusion of a SAS interface, although I suspect few of the buyers of the board will take advantage of it. I think the BIOS needs a bit more work, the ability to tweak the QPI settings may allow for more overclocking headroom, because as the MSI Eclipse showed us, the Core i7 920 has a LOT of overclocking headroom when paired with a great overclocking board.

The latest ExpressGate is quite functional, and I like the addition of the on-lines flash games depot. It is obviously advertising supported, however that revenue should let Asus add more flash games over time. Heck with one of the ExpressGate boards, your visitors can surf the net, instant message, and play flash games - without the possibility of messing up your main OS install.

Overclocking the board was painless, however the MSI Eclipse had a lot more headroom for overclocking - so if you are looking for an extreme overclocker, you are better off with an Eclipse, however if you want the best stock results without any tuning, you cannot go wrong with the Asus P6T Deluxe.