Asus P8P67 Standard Motherboard Review

In the beginning of this review we asked the question of what makes an enthusiast motherboard and does product segmentation really play a big factor in what you can do.  Having used several P67 motherboards up to this review we have come to the conclusion that a little goes a long ways.

The P8P67 is a very unique motherboard in that it comes from a line of mainstream motherboards with features normally reserved for higher end enthusiast models.  Features such as a digital PWM and hardware based system tuning are generally expensive and difficult to implement so most builders avoid using them except on the boutique level.  It is true that you won't find common enthusiast features like a PCI Express bridge chip or widely outrageous expansion slot layouts but if you think about it, most people don't need that stuff.

Performance was what we had expected and in some cases somewhat higher than our reference systems.  These performance attributes extended into our overclocking results giving us 4.9Ghz with only a few minor tweaks.  Chances are you can have similar performance provided your cooling is good and you have some time to tune your voltage settings.

One suprising feature of the P8P67 is how ASUS has provided two PCI Express x16 slots but locked the bandwidth down so that only one slot was operating at full bandwidth.  The secondary slot is really designed more for utility expansion since it borrows lanes from the MCP but that isn't to say you can't run a secondary card if you wanted. 

Easy to use UEFI BIOS
Extra space between video card slots
Digi+ VRM for stable power
Onboard Bluetooth

Lots of clicks to access to advanced BIOS menu
Not designed as a multi GPU motherboard