Above the socket we find the 8-pin 12v socket and a standalone MOSFET heatsink.


Heatsink and ATX 12v connector.

Further round we get to the six DDR3 DIMM slots. These work with the Core i7’s tri-channel memory controller. Up to 24gb can be installed in these if required although the majority of users will probably settle for a quarter of that! Alongside these there’s a lone 3-pin fan header, the boards 24-pin ATX connector and a convenient power switch – useful for testing the board when out of the case.


The six dimm slots - imposing!

Below this area we get to the six SATA sockets and the IDE connector. The placement is quite nice as they won’t interfere with any large installed GPU’s. In the background you can also see the passive heatsink which provides cooling for the Southbridge chip.


SATA and IDE connectivity.

Moving to the lower section of the board we find the front panel connection pins (to be used with the Q-connector) and all of the expansion sockets for additional USB and Firewire sockets. From this angle you can also better see the finned design of the Southbridge heatsink.


Front panel pins and USB/Firewire headers.

Above the USB and Firewire headers are the boards PCI-E and PCI slots. All the slots are fairly standard but only the two blue PCI-E 16x slots actually run at 16x – the lowest full length PCI-E slot only runs at 4x (another limitation of the downgraded SE board) so wouldn’t be recommended for graphics use. Relating to this the board also has no official Nvidia SLi capability. This was also removed to keep costs down and as a result the P6T-SE only officially supports ATi’s crossfire multi gpu system.


The board's fully loaded with PCI and PCI-E slots.

Between the PCI-E/PCI slots and the cpu socket we see the X58 Northbridge. This is a much larger heatsink and is passive like all the others on the board.


The P6T-SE's Northbridge is a nice passive design.

The Northbridge sink is linked to the MOSFET heatsink located to the left of the i7 socket via a heatpipe. This should hopefully provide a little extra cooling performance for the chipset located beneath.


Heatpipe should aid cooling.

Finally we can take a look at the I/O rear panel connections. It’s quite a generic higher end layout providing standard mouse and keyboard PS2 connectivity, six usb sockets, optical and coaxial audio outputs, a firewire socket, an eSATA socket, the Gigabit lan socket and a full set of analogue audio sockets.


The rear panel.