Intel X58 Extreme DX58SO Motherboard

Introduction:

Intel’s recent launch of the X58 chipset has led to many reviews praising the new chipset and CPU as being the fastest available to the consumer right now. Intel has the entire high end covered with the under $300 Core i7 920, the $500+ Core i7 940 and the $999 Core i7 965 XE. Intel sells their chipsets at a retail price of nearly the same as the CPUs meaning that a new system based upon the new CPU will cost over $1000 when you add in the cost of memory and hard drives and other components.

AMD has a hard time competing as their CPUs are not competitive with the latest offerings from Intel. I’ve reviewed motherboards from ASUS, ECS, and MSI based upon this chipset but what about the reference board from Intel? Intel generally makes good stable reference boards leaving the tweaking to the other board manufacturers based upon their reference design. Intel has tried to shake the feeling by releasing tweaked boards like the X48 Bonetrail 2 reference design. Last month they released the X58 chipset with the codename Smackover. The reference board is called the DX58SO and is on the review bench today.

Features:

Intel launched their new LGA (Land Grid Array) Socket 1366 Core i7 CPUs just a month ago and the only motherboard chipset that supports the new CPU is the Intel X58 chipset. The Core i7 re-introduced Hyper-Threading technology and supports Intel’s Shared Smart Cache technologies. The LGA-1366 is the first Intel CPU to have the memory controller on the CPU not the Southbridge as earlier chipsets would have.

The X58 chipset is the first Intel chipset to natively support both SLI and Crossfire on the chipset level. Unfortunately, NVIDIA has not certified the Intel X58 motherboard for SLI though the various motherboards based upon this from other manufacturers support SLI out of the box. The DX58SO motherboard does fully support ATI’s Crossfire multi-GPU solution where you can install two ATI cards and run them together, but it is not currently SLI capable.

One of the key features of modern motherboard design that have been adopted by many manufacturers is the Solid Capacitors. An issue with some motherboards is leaking capacitors that cause the motherboard to not function properly. Solid capacitors have the advantage of not breaking off and leaking making the motherboard last longer and more stable at higher power frequencies. Intel’s DX58SO board has Solid capacitors.

Intel first introduced support for DDR3 support to their motherboard chipsets with the launch of the X38 chipset in 2007. The X58 chipset got rid of support for the earlier DDR2 standard and standardized on DDR3 memory support. As the memory controller is now on the CPU the Core i7 has direct access to the memory instead of going through the Northbridge as earlier CPUs would. The X58 chipset supports up to triple channel memory with memory bandwidth up to 76.8GB/second.

Conclusion:

Intel has a lot to be happy about with their new CPU and X58 family launch, firmly taking over the enthusiast market with new processors that are clearly faster than the last generation. The DX58SO motherboard is nearly as fast as the other boards on the platform, with minor differences due to the board manufacturer tweaks in performance. Feature-wise, the DX58SO has done away with legacy connections like IDE and PS/2. The only troubling thing about this board is the layout, with SATA ports that are not sideways facing and the positioning of the 8-pin power connector. I wish everyone a safe and prosperous Holidays as this article was written in the midst of them.