ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution Intel P67 Motherboard Review

ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution Overview
The P8P67 WS revolution is a very nice looking board.  The PCB is black and you have blue and dark grey accents around the board.  ASUS always knows how to make motherboards visually appealing.  This is a full-sized ATX motherboard and it features a 2oz copper inner layer PCB design.  The heatsinks on the board are not that flashy, but still look cool.

ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution Intel P67 Motherboard ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution Intel P67 Motherboard

Starting up at the CPU bracket we can see that it is made by Lotes, as most of them have been on the P67 boards we have reviewed.  Around the CPU socket are 3 heatsinks that are connected with a heatpipe.  Here you can also see the Digi+ VRM design. The 16+2 digital architecture delivers twice the precision power, intelligently adjusting PWM voltage and frequency modulation with minimal power loss through BIOS tuning and exclusive user interface to increase over-clocking range while performance reaches its full potential. It also adjusts frequencies dynamically, cutting radiation interference by half to enhance system stability through enabling spread spectrum.  You can also see the use of Solid CAP’s, which offer better electronic conductivity and a longer lifetime.  At the top of the board you have the 8pin CPU power connector.

ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution Intel P67 Motherboard ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution Intel P67 Motherboard

Moving over to the 4 memory slots they are color coded blue and dark grey for dual-channel setups.  On thing you may notice is only the top of the slots have levers to release your memory, this is so if you have video cards installed you don’t need to remove them to access your memory.  You can have a total of 32GB of DDR3 memory installed.  Moving down there is a 4pin fan connector, USB 2.0 header, 4pin molex auxilery power conenctor, a 3pin fan connector, 24pin ATX power connector, the MemOK button and TPU switch.  The MemOK button will set the correct voltage and timings for your memory so the system will boot.  The TPU switch is ASUS’s instant overclocking system, it can either be enabled by this switch or in the software, which we will get into a little later in the review.

ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution Intel P67 Motherboard ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution Intel P67 Motherboard

Moving down the board you have 8 SATA ports all of which are color coded.  The 2 light grey ports are SATA 6GB/s ports.  The 4 light blue ports are SATA 3GB/s ports.  These 6 ports are controlled by the Intel P67 express chipset.  The 2 dark blue ports are SATA 6GB/s ports and are controlled by the Marvell 9128 PCIe SATA6Gb/s controller.  Moving down to the bottom of the board you have quite a few different connections.  Moving from left to right you have the SPDIF_OUT header, firewire header, EPU switch, USB header, COM port, TPM header, a 4pin fan header, 2 USB ports, and your front panel headers.  The TPM header is to be used with the included GP diagnostics card, which has an LED display for codes and a power and reset switch.  On most workstation boards you will find USB ports directly on the board.  This is for expensive programs that require dongles to run.  This puts the dongles inside of the case for safety and convenience.  This could also we used for a wireless dongle for a keyboard or mouse.

ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution Intel P67 Motherboard ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution Intel P67 Motherboard ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution Intel P67 Motherboard

There are four x16 PCI-E slots and three x1 PCI-E slots.  The thing that sets this board apart from many P67 boards is that it includes the NF200 chip.  This chip allows the blue slots to use x16 lanes of bandwidth and the grey slots to use x8 lanes of bandwidth.  So if you are using dual cards you are going to want to use the 2 blue slots.  The PCI-E slots are nicely spaced out too for use of dual-slot cards.  Looking at the I/O connections on the board starting from left to right you have the PS/2 keyboard and mouse connector, 4 USB 2.0 ports, coaxial and optical S/PDIF outputs, Gigabit ethernet port, 4 more USB ports, firewire, another Gigabit ethernet port, 2 USB 3.0 ports and 6 audio connections.

ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution Intel P67 Motherboard ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution Intel P67 Motherboard

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