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ASUS P6X58D Premium Motherboard Review

ASUS has taken its new Intel X58 chipset based motherboard to the next level, integrating support for Intel's Core i7 six core processors, SATA 6Gbps drive support, and USB 3.0 support. Just how well will this board fare in this overly competitive market space?

Subsystem Testing

NOTE: For all Subsystem Testing, an Intel LGA 1366 Core i7 920 CPU with the board base clock running at 133MHz and 3 x 2GB Patriot PVV34G2000LLK memory modules running at 1600MHz were used in testing.

Audio - Subjective Listening

One of the easiest ways to determine the quality of the audio subsystem is via a subjective sound test. Ideally, a sound test requires audio covering the entire spectrum, from subtle to intense. For this test, I chose to listen to the self titled Jimmy Eats World album.

The audio playback session was perfect, with no detected distortion evident.

Audio - Microphone Port Testing

The MIC-IN input was tested using our standard Labtec Desk Mic 524 testing microphone. Spoken words were recorded and played back using Microsoft Sound Recorder, with the Microphone Boost option disabled and enabled. The Microphone Boost option is found within the Advanced menu under the Microphone section within the Volume Control menu.

No distortion was evident during playback of the recorded audio sessions, but audio came across muted with and without Microphone Boost enabled. You definitely want to leave it on, and be mindful of the input volume as well.

Drive Performance

To adequately test the capabilities of the on board USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394 connections, we chose to use an ACOMDATA HD060U2FE-72-USB 2.0/FireWire HDD connected to both ports. SATA drive tests were performed using Western Digital 1TB SATA III hard drives on the SATA headers. The SATA drives were used for testing in RAID 0 on the Intel ICH10R controller only and in standalone mode on both the Intel ICH10R and Marvell 6G controllers. All drive benchmarks were done using the open source Iometer program.

As expected, the RAID 0 array outperformed both standalone drive configurations by over 5% in both cases. The standalone SATA drive on the Marvell 6G controller outperformed the same drive on the Intel ICH10R controller, coming in at slightly less than 5% faster. Both external devices performed as expected, with the USB 2.0 based devices seeming to have a slight performance advantage. In all cases, the measured CPU utilization remained below 1%.

Network Utilization Tests

Hagel Technologies’ DU Meter software was used in conjunction with Windows Task Manager to measure the performance of the onboard Marvell GigE NICs. Note that only a single set of results has been reported since both Marvell based controllers exhibited similar performance. DU meter was used to measure bandwidth, with Windows Task Manager to monitor the CPU utilization on the test system. For the test itself, a 750MB archive file containing various sized .WMA audio files for the large file transfer test and a 750MB worth of various sized .WMA audio files for the small files transfer test were used in conjunction with an integrated Gigabit NIC on the host system and a crossover cable to connect the host system to the test system. A crossover cable was used to rule out any possible bandwidth losses due to hub or switch passage.

Marvell GigE controller

The large file transfer results fell as expected, with the upload speed besting that of download by just under 10MB/s coming in at 47 MB/s. The CPU utilization remained close to 0% for the duration of both tests.

The small file transfer results also came in as expected, albeit a bit slower than the large file results. The upload speed bested that of download by a mere 5 MB/s, coming in at just under 42 MB/s. Again, the CPU utilization remained close to 0% during both tests.

Synthetic Performance Testing

Test Systems

The following system configurations were used for the system benchmark graphs, as well as all graphs listed under the Application and Gaming Benchmarks sections:

Graphs are labeled as follows: Motherboard - CPU Type & Clock Speed - Memory Speed

Sisoft Sandra 2009

Note that all results above were obtained running the installed memory in Dual Channel mode for all systems with the exception of the Intel X58 based boards, which ran in Triple Channel mode.

We see here that out X58 system takes a fairly large bandwidth hit when using our Core i7 Six Core processor. Our other Core i7 compared here is a Four Core processor. The memory subsystem is unchanged though. We still have the same triple channel memory system now feeding 50% more cores than before so it is understandable that we would seem some decline in overall bandwidth. Those of you that have heard about Intel moving to Quad Channel memory busses can see the handwriting on the wall here.

Here again, 6 Core vs. 4 Core and our 980X does enjoy a slight clock bump as well. The scaling here is most impressive. It would not have been my guess that we would have seen such a jump. This is testament to Intel HyperThreading scaling well.

Hiper Pi

This is a single threaded test and it shows our slight clock increase with the 980X.

wPrime

This is a heavily threaded test showing the prowess of the extra cores and threads on the 980X.

Overall our P6X58D motherboard is looking to be working properly. We have tested other boards with the 980X as of publishing this review and everything is in line.