Published in Reviews

Twelve X58 Boards roundup

by on12 August 2009

Index




Features:
Intel X58/iCH10R
6-phase VRM
ISL6336 VRM controller
Realtek RTL8111C PCIe Gb LAN controller
JMicro JMB368 PATA controller
ITE IT8720F super I/O controller
Realtek ALC888
ICS 9LPRS139AKLF clock generator
passive cooling of chipsets/VRM
8Mb BIOS, version: P06
Mainboard Revision: 1.00

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Slots:
2x PCIe 2.0 x16
1x PCIe x4
2x PCI

Memory:
3x Triple-Channel DDR3-slots for PC3-12800U memory up to 12GB

Storage:
6-Port SATA II featuring RAID 0, 1, 5, 0+1, JBOD
1-Port PATA

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Backpanel ports:
1x PS/2 keyboard
1x Gb LAN
8x USB 2.0
7.1 analog audio
1x optical audio out

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Accessories:
3x SATA cable


This is the most basic board in our round-up. While we can't argue about the price which is about €139, we find the lack of eSATA ports which costs about $1 and the cheapo SATA cables quite lacking. Also, they have stripped one PCIe x1 port. Hello? How much could such a port possibly cost? Probably as much as a sip of coffee, and bad coffee at that.

Besides that, the board was quite as good as the high-end boards which cost double the price. Two PCIe x16 are quite enough, two PCI slots are not the best you can wish for, but at this price range nobody expect customers will upgrade heavily. Spending €40,- more, you get into the price range of DFI,but get the same board with full solid capacitors, the missing PCIe x1 slot and two eSATA ports. Elitegroup offers that at just the same price-level.

So if you do only need the most essential basics, this board does nicely.

The board does feature a factory overclock:

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Overclocking:

Overclocking via BCLK did work fine, but for some reason the clock is not accurate. Adding 100mV more to the VCore did the job nicely. The i7 975 failed. We could enter the 29x multiplicator, but while the BIOS screen wrote 133x29, CPU-Z always reported x25. Also the BIOS does not offer any option to edit the Turbo per core which is quite disappointing. Of course we contacted Foxconn, but they did not fix it for over a week.

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Last modified on 13 August 2009
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