A Closer Look
The Asus P6X58D-E ventures toward the “economy” class , though I guess there isn’t really an “economy” X58 board. I have to consider an X58 board with a release price of well under $250 in the economy range. Layout of this board is kind of interesting. If I’m not mistaken, this is the first ATX motherboard of any brand I have owned with neither a floppy port nor an IDE port. I’ve been saying for some time that neither were needed, though it is kind of funny that I have recently been using an IDE optical drive after putting a couple of my SATA drives in family rigs. All I can say is, it’s about time, losing the two opens up a significant amount of room around the perimeter of the board.
Additionally, rather than both onboard I/O and Reset buttons, the P6X58D-E has only an I/O onboard switch, I assume to cut costs. Besides the CPU_fan, there are four other fan connectors on the board, which should be plenty for nearly all configurations.
The NB cooler has an interesting design, it is a pinfin type cooler with a “wave” shape, I assume to capitalize on any wind moving around the motherboard. There is a heatpipe between the NB cooler and the first power supply cooler. A lack of heatpipe between the two power supply coolers is among the only differences between this board and the P6X58D-E Premium, again obviously to cut costs.
The P6X58D-E has 16 + 2 phase voltage regulation, a massive power supply configuration. This ensures clean, stable power, giving improved stability and component life. It creates a prime environment for overclocking.
The board sports three PCI-E x16 slots supporting both SLI and CrossfireX. Multiple cards are configured either 3 @ x16/x8/x8 or 2 @ x16/x16 with the third slot being capable of X1.
The board looks pretty naked without the floppy and IDE ports, lots of extra room.
As all X58 boards, the P6X58D-E supports triple channel memory, up to 24 gigs of DDR3-2000 memory. The board has Asus’ MemOK, just push an onboard button for increased memory compatibility.
The board sports six onboard SATA 3Gb/s via the X58 chipset, and two onboard SATA 6Gb/s ports via the Marvell 9128 controller. The Intel ICH10R controller allows for RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10. The Marvell controller supports EZ Backup and SuperSpeed functions.
Both the board’s SATA 6Gb/s and Superspeed USB 3 are carried to the CPU via additional PCI-E lanes provided by Asus’ PLX bridge, allowing for full use of the chipset’s onboard PCI-E lanes by the video card(s), unlike on many other boards which use the video card’s lanes for these new storage features.
The I/O panel is a little sparse, again to keep the price of this board low. There are PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, a CCMOS button, 4 x USB 2.0 ports, a pair of USB 3 ports which double as USB 2.0, Coaxial and Optical S/PDIF, IEEE 1396, a single LAN port, and HD Audio.
Accessories include, one of Asus’ cool padded I/O shields, a pair of SATA 3Gb/s cables, a pair of SATA 6Gb/s cables, a 3-way SLI bridge, a Crossfire bridge, and a manual and driver disk.
