14 DAY TRIAL // Taking a look at the slew of P67 and H67 based motherboards that seem to be popping around in the news lately one would certainly notice that Asus is pretty slow to showcase their LGA 1155 solutions, but this is the case no more since during a local Asus event we got the chance to witness some of their upcoming Sandy Bridge solutions, including the P8P67 Pro.
First thing that you notice while taking a look at this solution is how feature rich this motherboard is, things like USB 3.0 and Bluetooth connectivity coming as standard, although we are dealing with what basically is a mainstream P67 motherboard.
Firewire and eSATA ale also among the feature list, SATA 6.0Gbit not missing from that package as one has come to expect from Asus' offerings.
And speaking of features that we now expect from every Asus motherboard out there, we also get some proprietary technologies such as Asus' very own Dual Intelligent Processors II that basically means you get both EPU functionality (designed to cut the board's power consumption) and the TPU technology designed for simple, trouble free overclocking.
The power delivery circuitry is built using a 12+2 phases design, these being cooled by two blueish radiators, a pretty straight forward approach that should prove to be more than enough for mainstream users, although overclockers will most certainly have to add some extra airflow if they want to go for a hefty CPU vCore increase.
Otherwise, the board comes with ample room for even the biggest coolers available out there, Asus also adding no less than three PCIe x16 slots to this board, with definitely more them enough space between them for a dual-GPU setup.
If you take a closer look, you will also see this motherboard comes with two NEC USB 3.0 controllers, allowing for a maximum of four SuperSpeed USB 3.0 ports to be installed, a header being present between the DDR3 memory slots and 24-pin ATX power connector for this purpose.
Another feature that from what we know is unique to Asus' line of Sandy Bridge motherboards is the new EFI BIOS, that comes standard in the P8P67 Pro for a more user friendly BIOS interface and included mouse support too.
End of it all I would say this looks like a strong contender for building a Sandy Bridge system, the P8P67 Pro coming with a clean layout and a pretty hefty feature list for a mainstream motherboard.
