Asus P8P67 Review

Performance Analysis

We were, of course, excited to see how the Asus P8P67 coped with our gruelling set of motherboard benchmarks, so once we’d finished marvelling at its pretty heatsinks, we strapped a Core i5-2500K to the board and bravely set off into the unknown.

The P8P67 performed well in our Media Benchmarks, notching up an overall score of 1,889. This was a little way behind the more expensive MSI P67A-GD65 (we'll bring you this review soon) due to the relatively slow score of 2,649 in the video encoding test.


Gaming performance on the P8P67 was a similar story: it was fast, but just a shade behind the MSI. We saw a difference of 2fps in the minimum frame rates in Crysis, although both boards were well above the 25fps minimum we declare as playable.

The P8P67 excelled in the rather less glamorous world of SATA read and write speeds too. The 354MB/sec read speed we saw from the P67-hosted SATA 6Gbps ports was well ahead of the MSI. The same was true of the extra pair of Marvel 9120-powered SATA 6Gbps ports that the two boards share, with the 347MB/sec read speed of the P8P67 eclipsing the 270MB/sec of the MSI.


Despite rumours to the contrary, Intel's new range of LGA1155 CPUs are very overclockable, as long as you choose a K-series model. We were impressed with Asus' new EFI system (a replacement technology for the BIOSes of old), and managed to crank the CPU from a stock speed of 3.3GHz all the way to 4.9GHz. We detail how we did this on the P8P67 Overclocking page.

At this speed, the P8P67 achieved frankly ludicrous results in our Media Benchmarks, clocking in an overall score of 2,687. To put this in perspective, the £150 Asus X58 Sabertooth with 6GB of RAM and a 4.4GHz 6-core, Hyper-Threaded Gulftown CPU managed an overall score of 2,529 – more than 150 points slower than the Sandy Bridge system. However, for massively multi-threaded applications, the Gulftown CPU is still miles better – compare the video encoding and CineBench R11.5 scores in our Intel Sandy Bridge review. Gaming performance also saw a boost from our overclock, with the minimum frame rate in Crysis jumping from 34fps to 42fps; an increase of 24 per cent.

Conclusion

If you’re in the market for an upgrade, all you should be thinking about is which LGA1155 CPU and motherboard you want. While the Asus P8P67 is a little slower than the MSI P67A-GD65 (review coming soon), its EFI system is better designed and it’s £20 cheaper. If you’re buying an LGA1155 processor, we can’t think of a better home for it.

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• Features
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• Overall
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• 9/10

Score Guide