I got my hands on one of these today:


Not a bad little CPU, but the mounting holes are a pain, almost half way between 775 and 1366 holes so the only cooler I could get to fit was an OEM 5-pipe core contact HPC. I should be able to get a bracket from XSPC for their Delta V3 block fairly quickly. The HPC cooler did a decent job, keeping it to 52C (32 idle) while running Prime95, i7 920 on the same cooler runs at 65-70C on P6T-SE so it is either underutilised by not having HT or it is a more efficient architecture. The board is on a pre-release BIOS (version 9999!) and there are none posted on ASUS site yet (anyone got a different BIOS?). I couldn't get it to OC yet and I had stability problems at stock settings. I'll be shooting for 3.6GHz to compare it to Ph2, C2Q & i7. Results to follow NDA dependent.

The voltage section of the BIOS is laid out like the CrosshairIII with voltage readings under each voltage setting and the rest of it looks very similar to the P6T series and OC Profile has been revamped to be like the MxA series and CrosshairIII with a number of slots for different profiles. I like this board already!