Intel DX58SO 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, Intel DX58SO has two eSATA-300 ports on the rear panel, controlled by a Marvell 88SE6121 chip. Notice that no parallel ATA port is available on this motherboard. This board also doesn’t have a floppy disk drive controller.

This motherboard has one Gigabit Ethernet port, which is controlled by the south bridge using one small chip (Intel 82567LM) to make the physical layer interface.

The audio section from this motherboard provides 7.1+2 audio, produced by the south bridge chip with the aid of a Realtek ALC889 codec, which is an outstanding solution, providing an impressive 108 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the analog outputs, 106 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the analog inputs and up to 192 kHz sampling rate for both inputs and outputs. We always complain about the low input signal-to-noise ratio (i.e., 90 dB or below) for the analog input on on-board audio solutions, but Realtek ALC889 is a beautiful exception: you will be able to capture and edit analog audio (e.g., converting LPs to CDs or MP3, converting VHS to DVDs or any other digital format, etc) with this motherboard without adding any background noise.

Even though this motherboard has 7.1 audio, it only provides 5.1 analog audio outputs. But this isn’t a problem, as it has an optical SPDIF output connector and people that want a 7.1 speaker setup will probably buy a set of digital speakers or use a home theater receiver anyway.

This motherboard has 12 USB 2.0 ports with eight of them soldered on the rear panel. Usually motherboards have four or six USB ports on the rear panel, so it is good to see eight of them there, especially because this motherboard does not have traditional mouse and keyboard connectors (PS/2 connectors), so you have to use USB keyboard and mouse. 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 also has two FireWire (IEEE1394) ports controlled by a Texas Instruments TSB43AB22A chip, with one soldered on the rear panel and another available through an I/O bracket.

On the connectivity side this motherboard also supports infrared transmitter and receiver, which don’t come with the board.

In Figure 8, you can see the motherboard rear panel with two eSATA-300 ports, eight USB 2.0 ports, one FireWire port, one Gigabit Ethernet port, analog independent 5.1 audio outputs and optical SPDIF output.

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Figure 8: Motherboard rear panel.

As mentioned, this motherboard doesn’t have standard mouse and keyboard connectors (PS/2) and it also doesn’t have parallel and serial ports.