Asus - P8P67-M Pro review
Micro-ATX Sandy Bridge motherboard
Review date: 17 February, 2011. Review by: IT Reviews Staff
The Asus P8P67-M Pro is a Micro-ATX motherboard that uses Intel's new P67 chipset, and supports the new range of second-generation LGA1155 Core i5/i7 processors, code-named 'Sandy Bridge'.
What's new in P67
As you'd expect, most of the motherboard's features are supplied by the chipset - but in this respect, you might be disappointed to discover that the P67 is actually very similar to earlier P55. It isn't difficult to trace the DNA of this motherboard from this previous generation, which supported the first wave of LGA1156 Core i5/i7 CPUs.
Perhaps the most obvious difference is that while the chipset supports the same number of SATA hard disk connectors - six - only four of these on the new board are SATA 2.0. The other two support the faster SATA 3.0 standard. Still, it's a minor change.
Graphics support consists of a pair of PCI Express 2.0 slots that either supply 16 lanes to a single graphics card, or eight each lanes to both of the slots if you use CrossFireX. The third long PCI Express slot looks like it also supplies 16 lanes, but actually supplies only supplies four. Between the two graphics slots you'll find a tiny PCIe x1 slot.
Out with the old...
Asus has dispensed with support for most older, 'legacy' devices on this smaller micro-ATX board - so you can wave goodbye to regular PCI slots unless you buy the full-sized P8P67 Pro. Other legacy items that have vanished include the traditional IDE and floppy connectors - and about time, too - but Asus has made the curious decision to include COM and LPT headers.
On the I/O panel there are two PS/2 connectors, along with six USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, one eSATA, one FireWire, Gigabit Ethernet and the usual audio hardware. Those two USB 3.0 ports are provided by an add-in controller chip, as Intel's chipset doesn't yet natively support this new standard.
...and in with the new
Asus has added two more chips to assist performance. The EPU power-saving chip is used on a number of Asus motherboards, and this Pro version also has a TPU or Ultimate Turbo Processor to assist performance.
Oddly enough, one of the most significant additions that Asus has made to the board may well slip past the attention of the mainstream PC user. When you turn on your new PC, you're faced with the usual message to 'Press DEL to enter set-up'; however, this doesn't take you to a traditional BIOS screen. Instead, it introduces you to a UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) screen. This means that you can navigate the set-up using your mouse and keyboard - much more convenient than the old cursor-keys approach.
UEFI also supports hard drives that are larger than 2.2TB, which may sound like an enormous amount of capacity but you can buy a 2TB drive for a mere £70. 3TB models are already on sale from Hitachi and WD.
If you have a motherboard with a traditional BIOS, you need third-party software such as Asus Disk Unlocker to make full use of a hard drive larger than 2.2TB.
Performance settings
The main screen of the UEFI defaults to a simple mode where you can choose between Power Saving, Normal and Optimal modes, as well as selecting a boot device with a single click of the mouse. The UEFI firmware is version 0404, which suggests that Asus went through a number of versions during development of the P8P67-M Pro. We still feel that more work is required. When we selected Optimal mode we found that our Core i5-2500K was overclocked to a maximum Turbo speed of 4.0GHz, but it was unstable and crashed during benchmarks.
We took this as our cue to try the Advanced settings in the UEFI, and found most of the usual Asus BIOS overclocking features were present and correct - but there was no way to raise the CPU core voltage. Overclocking a Sandy Bridge processor is a relatively simple process, provided you own one of the unlocked 'K' series models, in which case you simply increase the level of Turbo Boost. Mainstream CPUs are essentially non-adjustable, so the 100MHz base clock bus speed can only be raised by a tiny amount - which pretty much leaves DDR3 memory speed as the only option.
We were able to successfully raise the Turbo Boost to 42x to give a speed of 4.2GHz, raising our PC Mark Vantage score from 16,304 to 19,168. When we went on to raise the Turbo speed further to 4.4GHz, the level of performance dropped slightly to 18,958. In an ideal world we'd have raised CPU core voltage from 1.20V to 1.25V, but (as mentioned) this option wasn't available.
Still, it's a decent level of performance when you consider that we changed a single setting to increase the level of Turbo Boost. We were happy with the list of features and were generally impressed by the Asus P8P67-M Pro.
Verdict
In the main, we liked what we saw with the Asus P8P67-M Pro. This Micro-ATX Sandy Bridge motherboard will do pretty much anything you want. There is, however, a minor fly in the ointment - as well as a bigger potential problem.
Smallest grumble first: we'd like to have seen the space taken by the old-fashioned PS/2 ports occupied by two USB ports instead. The bigger problem is that Intel has reported a SATA problem with its 6 series of chipsets. This affects only the SATA 2.0 connectors of Sandy Bridge boards - so if you were planning to use only the SATA 3.0 controllers, you'd be fine. If not, for the time being you'd be advised to put your Sandy Bridge plans on hold.
Company: Asus
