The Board

The new ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution is a nice looking board. There is something to be said about a nice black PCB and matt silver heatsinks. It just gives an overall look of class.

If you take a close look at this image here, you can see a couple of things. One is the clean layout of the chokes and regulators; the other that is a little less visible is the slightly larger than normal traces on the board. You can also see the MemOK! button which allows you to test your memory and automatically set the timings that will allow you to boot properly.

If you are one of those people that like to do a lot of benchmarking (or just like an open case), then there is a switch up here for you. It is labelled "TPU Switch" and is designed to improve performance when in an open case or on a bench.

Even around the CPU socket we see a cleaned up layout and the classy looking heatsink setup. The matte brushed aluminium look has a very nice effect. However, despite all of that, we still find the 8-pin aux power connector in an awkward place. It is a shame really, as we have noticed this moved towards the upper edge of the motherboard on a few other ASUS P67 based products.

Here we find more evidence of the beefed up traces and also get a nice look at the NF200 chip and how startlingly close it is to the primary PCIe slot.

The clean layout follows us down into the peripheral slots on the lower half of the motherboard. Here we find an interesting array as we find four x16 mechanical slots and three x1 slots. Now, the board only supports three-way SLI or Crossfire. This means that we cannot possibly have four x16 electrical slots; which is the case. What we end up with are the two blue slots which can act as x16 with a single card and should be used for the traditional dual card SLI or Crossfire. However, the two black slots share lanes with the blue slot above each. If you drop a video (or any other type) of card in here you will only get x8 and you will cut the number of lanes to the blue PCIe slot above it in half.

As with many workstation boards, there are a pair of USB ports directly off of the lower edge of the P8P67 WS Revolution. These are great for expensive dongles that are required to run certain applications like LightWave 3D and Mach Studio Pro. It puts the dongles inside the case, making them hard to steal. But there is more here than just the USB ports; we can also see the Marvell SATA 3.0 controller right next to the SATA ports. If you look closely, you can also catch a glimpse of the TPU unit.

In this shot we see the large number of USB (and other) ports you have for I/O. The two LAN ports are Intel based and between them the P8P67 WS should give you some excellent networking performance. ASUS has actually made Intel the standard for all of their boards with the exception of their entry level products, and in some cases boards with multiple LAN ports.