Intel Core i7 920 940 965 Review & Overclocking - PAGE 10

Intel Extreme Motherboard DX58SO

Intel has a whole black-and-blue theme going with the DX58SO... the board is meant to look baaaddd.

One of the first things I noticed about the motherboard were the small heatsinks - far smaller than the monstrosities we have become accustomed to on Socket 775 motherboards. This is a good indication that Intel thinks that the thermal envelope of the chipset is under control.

The next thing I noticed was the lack of "legacy" connectors - while I've become used to the lack of a serial or parallel port, it was a bit shocking to not see at least one PS/2 port, and there was no sign of a floppy or IDE connector on the motherboard!

Looking at the back of the board we see that Intel is serious about the mounting of not only the processor heatsink, but also that of the X58 Northbridge.

Look at those nice solid state caps and coils.. and the heatsinks on the voltage regulators.

One of the few things I did not like about the motherboard is that only one of the three memory channels supported two DIMMs. Come on, with such a high end board and processor let me stuff 12GB or more memory in there!

Here we have a pretty big heatsink for the X58, and a standard 24 pin power connector.

The six Sata-II ports are nicely spaced out, making cabling more convenient, and note the small heatsink on the Southbridge.

As you can see, there are two PCIe 16x connectors, one PCIe 4x connector, two PCIe 1x connectors and a lone PCI slot.

Here is another angle on the slots:

The IO panel is a bit sparse looking - two eSATA ports take the space normally taken by PS/2 connectors; eight USB2.0 ports, one FireWire, one Gigabit Ethernet and many audio connectors - including an optical out - complete the back panel.

Here is the stuff that came in the Intel evaluation kit: