ASUS P8P67 LGA 1155 SATA 6Gbps USB 3.0 Supported Intel P67 ATX DDR3 2400 Motherboards P8P67 PRO

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Igor V. Zavoychinskiy (San Jose, CA USA) –

  

I bought with motherboard to solve one main issue: my two GTX295 were not running at full capabilities on ancient P5N mobo. With reading of many articles and studying hardware I chose to upgrade to 2nd generation i5. This mobo claims that it’s quad SLI compatible (each GTX295 has two GPUs on-board) so, I ordered it. The mobo is very excellent, manufacturing quality is very high, documentation and wiring are all OK. But the problem is: quad SLI is unstable on it. I can ran any of my video cards in a single mode (really, double SLI) but when I set both cards video driver just crash on init in any game. I use Corsair Professional 1200W PSU and EVGA video cards so, it’s unlikely that hardware is terrible. I also tried three versions of NVIDIA drivers including the latest one. Since I was running quad SLI on my ancient apparatus with no issues (except below loading of GPUs) I tend to blame the mobo.

Though, PCIe x16 sockets have excellent layout. Most of the manufacturers place them too close and if you use two modern video cards you get a cooling problem since single card takes two expansion slots. Here x16 connectors has a gap of 2 slots which give you 1 slot of space between the cards.

Other issues:
- Win7 cannot install drivers for most motherboard devices. HDD and video get detected with no problems but network, raid and other staff need supplied CD.
- Even when all drivers have been installed one device still doesn’t work: PCI-controller Simple Communications. I have no thought what it is. Windows doesn’t have thought too.
- Mobo has built-in Bluetooth. Nice to have but not very useful. I’d prefer WiFi module or extra USB 3.0 port.

Note for those who own 2-cores video cards. In peacefulness to make use of both cores you *must* activate SLI in drivers. If you don’t do that your video will be running on a single GPU. There are people who use default settings and claim terrible performance but it’s just a incorrect setting.

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Ryan Kern-Mount (Grass Valley, CA USA) –

  

I bought this motherboard to replace an aging (yet trusty) Asus P5W DH Luxurious and an Core 2 Q6600.

The installation was simple with a few annoyances listed in the cons below. By and large I am very pleased with this motherboard. Asus commonly produced quality products, and the P8P67 Pro is an model of that. The overclocking options are many, and the EFI BIOS is really nice to navigate. There are also plenty of RAID options.

Pros
- Straight forward overclocking. Can be done via the OS with one click to get you to 4.3Ghz.
- Stable with the latest BIOS
- Commonly a excellent layout, with the exception of the SATA ports
- Plenty of USB ports, with 4 USB 3 ones
- 6.0Gbps SATA, which pairs perfectly with a a SSD

Cons
- The SATA port placement is a real pain in the butt. If you have to add an additional drive with installation, it’s gonna be a pain. You may have to remove the board depending on your case.
- The bundled BIOS was flaky, but an update fixed that.
- The EFI BIOS did not play nicely with my Microsoft Wireless Mouse. I had to use a wired one. (the Wireless Keyboard was fine)
- This was my second board. The first one had a terrible PCIe 2x slot. Annoying.

My System
Asus P8P67 Pro
i5-2500K overclocked to 4.3Ghz
8GB G.Skill RipJaws 2 X 4GB
Crucial M4 128GB SSD
Western Digital 500GB Hard Drives X2 (RAID 1)

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This board does all i want it to for a budget build. It does include USB 3.0 and SATA 6GB/s if you ever want to upgrade or go straight to the new interfaces. it works fantastic with windows 7 64.

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