ASUS P8P67 and P8P67 Deluxe Intel Sandy Bridge Motherboard Review

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

I am going to admit, I wish that I had more time to play with both the ASUS P8P67 and the ASUS P8P67 Deluxe. They have been great boards to work with and I have thoroughly enjoyed the time I have had with them. Since we looked at two boards that fall into different price points we are going to break up the last page into multiple parts. First, we will take a look at my thoughts on the ASUS P8P67 and then we will follow it up with thoughts on the ASUS P8P67 Deluxe.

When looking at the ASUS P8P67, there are a few features I wish it had. Then I have to kick myself because the ASUS P8P67 is the entry level Intel P67 chipset board from ASUS. Retailing at ~$160.00 there were certain features that were left out to keep the price down. Features like SLI and eSATA are nice, but ASUS has other boards for that. The P8P67 Pro, P8P67 EVO and Deluxe all support SLI and eSATA, so there are plenty of options if you are looking for those features.

When it comes to performance the ASUS P8P67 is no slacker. In single card configurations it was able to keep up with the ASUS P8P67 Deluxe in all of our tests without fail. It was only in CrossFireX that we could see the ASUS P8P67 Deluxe begin to pull away in our game tests. When talking with ASUS, they mentioned that the ASUS P8P67 is designed to support basic CrossfireX and that the majority of people buying the ASUS P8P67 as an entry level board won’t be running CrossFireX.

What I do like about the ASUS P8P67 is the price. Coming in at a low price of only ~$160.00, the ASUS P8P67 motherboard is a very attractive option if you are looking for a motherboard that will support the latest Sandy Bridge Processors without breaking the bank for features you don’t need. Overclocking the Intel Core i5 2500K went very smoothly and we were able to hit the Multi-wall of our processor before we maxed out the ASUS P8P67 motherboard’s capabilities in overclocking.

Legit Bottom Line: Coupling the low $160.00 price point, great overclocking capabilities, a great set of features and a three year warranty to boot make the ASUS P8P67 a great entry level board and worthy of our Value Award!

Now that we have decided that the ASUS P8P67 is a great value, we need to take a look at the ASUS P8P67 Deluxe. The P8P67 Deluxe is sitting pretty at the top of the P8P67 series, and the ASUS P8P67 is the current entry level board. Not to worry though, ASUS has a total of eleven boards that will be coming to market in the near future.

ASUS Full ATX Intel P67 Chipset Motherboards

• P8P67 ~$160
• P8P67 PRO ~190
• P8P67 EVO ~210
• P8P67 Deluxe ~235
• SABERTOOTHP67 ~$219
• P8P67 WS SC ~$259
• Maximus IV Extreme ~365

ASUS Micro-ATX Intel P67 and H67 Chipset Motherboards

• P8P67-M PRO ~$149
• P8H67-M EVO ~$129

ASUS Mini-ITX Intel P67 and H67 Chipset Motherboards

• P8H67-I Deluxe (Price is yet to be determined.)

ASUS P8P67 Deluxe Final Thoughts and Conclusion

When it comes to performance ASUS knows what they are doing. And it seems that they have put that knowledge into the ASUS P8P67 Deluxe! Gaming performance was top notch, especially when we start talking about multi-GPU scaling. We saw nearly a 99% performance gain in CrossFireX in Aliens Vs. Predator. The ASUS P8P67 Deluxe had better CrossFireX scaling than the ASUS P8P67 and the ECS P55H-AK with the Intel Core I5 655K processor hands down!

When testing the components that make up the ASUS P8P67 Deluxe, we ran into no issues or short comings. In fact, we seem to be hitting the maximum performance of the Western Digital (WD1002FAEX) SATA6 1TB Hard Drive as well as the SUNBEAMTECH Airbox USB3.0 External Hard Drive Enclosure. We are working on picking up some faster drives for this testing and we will update these numbers as soon as we can.

Overclocking was just as smooth as with the ASUS P8P67 and the ASUS Auto Tune worked great. Running the Auto Tune we were able to boost the Sandy Bridge CPU frequency by over 1GHz with a simple change in the BIOS. Once we started manually adjusting the BIOS settings in the AI Tweaker we were able to take our Intel Core i5 2500K up to the multi-wall and max out the Core i5 2500K before we hit the limits of the ASUS P8P67 Deluxe. All this talk of the BIOS and we haven’t even commented on the new EFI BIOS! In short, the new ASUS EFI BIOS is great. It is really nice being able to use a mouse to navigate around rather than just the arrow keys. It took a little getting used to working with the new EFI BIOS, but once you have become accustomed to them you won’t want to go back to the traditional system BIOS we have all come to know.

The bundle that comes with the ASUS P8P67 Deluxe includes a front panel USB3 ports that will mount inside a 3.5″ drive bay. This really opens up your choices of computer cases, since not many currently have USB3 integrated into the case yet. If you are planning to upgrade the motherboard and CPU into an existing case, the front panel USB3 will be a nice little perk that comes with the ASUS P8P67 Deluxe. The ASUS P8P67 Deluxe carries a three year warranty to give you peace of mind with your purchase!

Legit Bottom Line: The ASUS P8P67 Deluxe performs great and there is absolutely nothing more I could ask of it!