Running my SSD from these multi-lane ports instead (and disabling the 2 Marvell ports in the board's excellent BIOS) unleashes the SSD's full potential.
EASY REMEDY: I purchased a low-cost SATA III add-on card and installed it in one of the P6x58D's other two PCIE x16 slots. Besides various problems many experienced-including me-with this Marvell chip and its fiddly firmware integration, it's the original single-lane design that presents a bottleneck vis-a-vis newer boards' muti-lane design. Anyway, the bottom line is that equipped with a later edition i7 processor-say the 950 or higher-any decent DDR3 RAM, video card, and an SSD, this exceptional board will STILL keep pace with many of today's higher-end systems, and that's pretty amazing given the aforesaid race to obsolescence that has traditionally prevailed.Īs far as negatives, while 6GB SATA III ports were novel at the time, Asus added them to this board using only a single PCIE lane and basing them on the Marvell 902x chip. That said, pieces of kit like this Asus P6x58D MoBo lead me to conclude that in at least certain regards, the rate of techno-evolution has either slowed somewhat, or perhaps that this board-and the Intel X58-ICH10R chipset upon which it is based-were simply ahead of their time. (I'm in my late 50s, and the technological evolution I've watched unfold between my high school days and the present has been relentless and truly breathtaking!) The observation that within a few short years, any computer system is outdated-"an antique" of sorts is tough to refute. "The Future is Not What it Used to Be!" (Paul Valery)