ASUS P6T Deluxe uses the Intel ICH10R south bridge chip, which supports six SATA-300 ports with RAID 0, 1, 10 and 5. In addition to these ports, ASUS P6T Deluxe has one eSATA-300 port and one ATA-133 port controlled by a Marvel 88SE6111 chip and two SAS ports controlled by a Marvell 88SE6320 chip, supporting RAID 0 and 1. SAS, Serial Attached SCSI, is an interface standard used by enterprise-class hard disk drives, which provide higher performance compared to SATA drives. It is somewhat easy to find SAS drives with 15,000 rpm rotational speed, while most SATA drives rotate at 7,200 rpm. This is the first time we’ve seen a motherboard targeted to regular PCs with an on-board SAS controller. Another advantage of this motherboard from ASUS is the presence of one ATA-133 port, since Intel X58 does not provide one, and a floppy disk drive controller, feature not available on Intel DX58SO “Smackover”.
click to enlarge
Figure 5: SAS (orange), SATA and ATA-133 ports.
The portrayed board comes also with two hot swap connectors for hard disk drives, allowing you to install and remove two hard drives without the need of installing cables on them.
This motherboard has two Gigabit Ethernet ports, which are controlled by two Marvell 88E8056 controllers, which are connected to the system using PCI Express lanes and thus able to achieve their maximum performance.
The audio section from this motherboard provides 7.1 audio, produced by the south bridge chip with the aid of an Analog Devices AD2000B codec. This codec does not exist on Analog Device’s website, but some websites say this is an AD1989B manufactured exclusively for ASUS with the same basic specs. Problem is, this codec isn’t listed on Analog’s website as well. So we can’t talk about specific features from the audio section of this motherboard, in particular the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).
This motherboard provides 7.1 independent analog audio outputs, which is great (even though Intel DX58SO has also 7.1 audio, it only offers 5.1 analog audio outputs). It also features on-board coaxial and optical SPDIF outputs (Intel DX58SO has only optical SPDIF out).
This motherboard has 14 USB 2.0 ports with eight of them soldered on the rear panel. By the way, the ICH10 chip has a feature called “USB Port Disable” that allows you to disable individual USB ports. This is a very interesting feature to have on PCs that are used by several different people to prevent users from installing USB devices (for example, an external hard drive or a USB drive, which can contain viruses and also to prevent people from copying data).
This motherboard has also two Firewire (IEEE1394) ports controlled by a VIA VT6308 chip, with one soldered on the rear panel and another available thru an I/O bracket. This motherboard comes with an I/O bracket containing one Firewire port (mini format) and two USB ports.
On the connectivity side this motherboard also supports infrared transmitter and receiver, which don’t come with the board.
On Figure 6 you can see the motherboard rear panel: PS/2 connector, eight USB 2.0 ports, coaxial and optical SPDIF outputs, one Firewire port, one eSATA port, two Gigabit Ethernet ports and independent analog 7.1 audio outputs.
click to enlarge
Figure 6: Motherboard rear panel.
If you pay close attention to Figure 6 you will see that this motherboard uses a unique configuration for its PS/2 port. Instead of having one keyboard port and one mouse port, it has only one PS/2 port that can be used by either a PS/2 keyboard or a PS/2 mouse. This is the first time we’ve seen such configuration.
This motherboard doesn’t have parallel and serial ports.
