Asus P8P67 review

Intel’s 2nd generation Core i5 and i7 processors require a new motherboard socket and chipset. Asus’s P8P67 has the necessary LGA1155 socket, and is the cheapest of its three boards based around the P67 chipset (with Pro and Deluxe versions also available). This chipset eschews support for the new processors’ integrated graphics, instead being designed for those who want to use a dedicated graphics card.

If you want to overclock your new Intel processor, and you probably will given how easy it is to get extra performance from it, you have to buy a P67-based board. Now, we accept that overclocking and powerful graphics cards often interest the same people, but we don’t see why Intel has prevented overclocking on H67 boards – which include support for Intel’s HD graphics – especially as the integrated graphics are so capable.

Asus’s P8P67 has everything you’d expect from a modern board. There are two PCI-Express x16 sized slots, with the latter running at 4x speed, and sharing its bandwidth with the two PCI-Express x1 slots and the USB3 controller. None of which should cause any problems unless you’re using dual graphics cards (in SLI or CrossFire X) while transferring files via USB3.

There are no IDE headers on this board, so you’ll finally have to ditch any old IDE optical drives or hard disks. The chipset includes six SATA ports, two of which are SATA3, and all of which can be arranged into a RAID array. Asus has added a second controller with two more SATA3 ports.