Final Thoughts
Being one of the first workstation motherboards I have looked at in a while I am very impressed with what ASUS has done with the P8P67 WS Revolution. You can see so many of the features that are geared towards workstation users. The ability to run quad video card setups, the internal USB ports on the board, and the server-class components really make this the ideal workstation board and I can see why ASUS board are so popular with the workstation crowd. I also like that ASUS has added 2 more RAID capable SATA 6GB/s ports giving you a total of four.
Besides just workstation users this board would make a perfect gaming board. As I said you are able to do quad-CorssFire and Tri-SLI with this board. The NF200 chip makes this setup even better by providing full bandwidth when you are using more than 2 cards. On other boards using the P67 chipset the x16/x8/x8 setup is not natively supported. There is only one other P67 board available that has the NF200 chip and it is the Gigabyte P67A-UD7.
The EFI BIOS’s are something we are seeing on all new Intel P67 boards and ASUS’s implementation of it is the best that I have seen. The initial BIOS page gives you all the settings novice users need to setup their system. If you go in to the advanced settings everything is nicely organized and you have all the settings you need to really tweak your system. The Ai Tweaker tab is very extensive and has all of the options you need to get the perfect overclock on your system.
Talking about overclocking with the P8P67 WS Revolution I was able to achieve my highest overclock ever on my Core i5-2500K. I got the system all the way up to 4.7GHz stable! This is a 1.4GHz overclock from the stock speed of 3.3GHz. This really shows the quality and stability of the components on the board. If you are new to overclocking ASUS’s Auto Turning feature is great. You just select either Fast or Extreme and the motherboard will automatically reboot and “tune” the system for the best overclock.
One thing I really love about ASUS motherboards is the Ai Suite II software. It has pretty much every option you need to tweak your system within the Windows operating system. The TurboV EVO tool makes it easy to overclock your system and change voltages. One thing that I was very impressed with was the Digi+ VRM tool that allows you to change the load-line calibration, Digi+ VRM frequency and phase control. This is the first time I have seen options like this built in to motherboard software.
Right now the P8P67 WS Revolution sells for $259.99 at my favorite online retailer. With all of the features of this board it definitely warrants that price. In comparison Gigabyte’s P67A-UD7 sells for $314. If you are looking for a great Sandy Bridge workstation board this is your definite choice! Overall ThinkComputers gives the ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution Intel P67 Motherboard a 10 out of 10 score and our Recommended Award.
Pros:
– Server-class components
– NF200 chip
– Great overclocking
– EFI BIOS
– Ai Suite II
– SATA 6GB/s and USB 3.0
Cons:
– None that I found
