Roughly a month into its release, the P6T Deluxe is the most "affordable" LGA 1366 motherboard by ASUS. This however, isn't one of the most affordable LGA 1366 motherboards there are. There is a need for ASUS to cater to the value-ended LGA 1366 segment, which already has other major motherboard vendors' offerings such as the MSI X58 Platinum, Gigabyte EX58 DS4, etc.

ASUS will be releasing a toned-down variant of the P6T Deluxe, to be named P6T. It is based on the Intel X58 + ICH10R chipset. The CPU power circuitry consists of an 8+2 phase design. The memory is powered by a 2-phase circuit. ASUS reworked the arrangement of the expansion card slots, with uniform spacing between the three PCI-Express x16 slots (have electrical lane arrangements of x16/16/x1 or x16/x8/x8). The motherboard supports ATI CrossFireX and NVIDIA 3-way SLI. A slightly simplistic component cooling has been introduced. There is a single gigabit ethernet controller. With these, ASUS looks to bring the motherboard out at an attractive price-point.

Expreview has got its hands on the NVIDIA Forceware Beta Driver 180.32 and used it to setup and enable SLI with two Galaxy GTX260-216, on an Asus P6T Deluxe motherboard. The cards scored a 3DMark Vantage score of P21623, compared against a single card score of P10920 gives an approximate 98% increase. Currently it is only possible to enable SLI officially on NVIDIA based chipsets, only AMD's equivalent Crossfire system works on Intel chipsets. It is evident that the 180 series of Forceware drivers from NVIDIA (dubbed Big Bang II) not only brings multi-monitor SLI support, but also paves the way to enabling SLI on the Intel X58 Chipset. In another article, Expreview have also mentioned that the beta driver 180.42, will be officially released from NVIDIA later on today, with the final version set for November 17th this year, coinciding with the launch of Intel's Core i7 and X58.

Remember the A-DATA DDR3 triple channel memory and the ASUS P6T Deluxe motherboard? They are both detailed on our page, but this story aims to show how both parts perform when working coupled with a quad-core Core i7 engineering sample CPU. The results you're about to see below are achieved by three 1600MHz A-DATAs overclocked to over 2000MHz. The result is system memory read/write speeds of up to the incredible 20515/16946 MB/s. The latency time is also worth mentioning - 22.9ns.

To support the upcoming LGA-1366 socket Core i7 processors, motherboard manufacturers have their first-waves of motherboards ready. ASUS for one, has had its P6T Deluxe pictured before several of its competitors could have their flagship motherboards pictured on the internet. Enter P6T Deluxe OC Palm Edition. What's new with this motherboard is that it bundles a gadget ASUS calls an "OC Palm", looking at its visual similarity to hand-held PCs. The device holds controls apart from an LCD screen. What this gadget does is, that it allows you on-the-fly overclocking of several system parameters for which, you would have had to use the system BIOS configuration. The device is handled by software that does the changes, it connects to the motherboard using standard USB interface, and the LCD screen gives the convenience of overclocking even when say playing a game. That apart, the package gives you essentially the same P6T Deluxe motherboard.