The Board - Layout

The ASUS P8P67 PRO, clad in blue on black, caught our eye right away, boasting quite a few features seemingly catering to a specific crowd. The all-blue heatsinks hint of cool waves, but the packaging lead to us not expecting what we found inside, setting our expectations pretty high. Sporting three x16 PCIe slots, rarely seen except on extreme enthusiast products, the P8P76 PRO seemed to have a longer reach than its competitors. The back of the board has bits of surface-mounted components like splatters of blood on a MMA fighter after a good fight, yet its composure hints that it's not willing to walk away the loser.


Beneath the large cool blue heatsinks sits a tight formation of inductors, hidden under the blue protective armor on either side. With the socket's center hole filled and not an empty spot in sight we felt confident that we were going to see a good fight real soon. It left us slightly puzzled why the heatsinks seemed so large, with the inductors barely sticking out, but flipping the board over and finding several VRM-supporting parts mounted directly opposite made clear that this wolf in sheep clothing might let out a howl if given the chance.


With well balanced spacing between the seven expansion slots, the dual PCI and dual x1 PCIe slots spread between the three x16 PCIe slots help this multi-disciplined fighter prepare for just about any battle in the steel cage that is your computer case. With two of the x16 slots supported through the CPU, and the third through the P67 chipset, both Crossfire and SLI are supported. The four DIMM slots can each be populated with 8 GB sticks of memory, leaving the ASUS P8P67 PRO's memory support weighing in at a hefty 32 GB. Right next to the DIMM slots we find a USB 3.0 front panel header, seemingly placed to minimize cable clutter, however, because the included bracket only allows mounting the ports to the rear panel, we felt that maybe either the header's location, or perhaps the wrong mounting, may have been chosen.


The bottom edge of the board is lean and mean, with several open spaces for components hinting that perhaps the ASUS P8P67 PRO learned some of its skills from one of its bigger brothers. The six internal USB headers and front panel header form a neat line along the very edge, with a FireWire and the audio headers huddled directly behind in the corner. We find four separate fan connectors, with three spaced around the upper edge and one down on the opposite end. Only the CPU fan header carries PWM support, but control for both it and the 3-pin chassis fan header are available both in software and in BIOS.


On the backplate we find separate PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports, optical and coaxial digital audio, two eSATA, FireWire, eight USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, a six-port analogue audio panel, and one of the first features we haven't seen anywhere else, a Bluetooth port. A total of eight SATA ports are found on the opposite side, with the four light blue ports on the bottom featuring SATA2 support, and the upper four all support SATA 6 Gb/s, with the white ports and the SATA 2 ports driven off of the P67 chipset, and the dark blue driven by a Marvell controller. That's not all this board has to offer though; hit the next page for a closer look.