ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review

We check out the Mini ITX H67 offering from ASUS and see just what kind of performance this tiny board can offer.

Published
Updated
Manufacturer: ASUS
11 minutes & 7 seconds read time

Introduction and Package

Introduction

ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 02

I'm not sure why, but I'm a huge fan of the tiny mITX form factor. It's come a long way from the days of VIA powered boards and while they indeed were cool, they just didn't have the performance you could get out of mATX or larger boards which could carry those faster Intel and AMD CPUs.

The format has really blown up lately, though, and we're seeing more and more companies offer mITX boards based on chipsets that indeed offer the chance to give us some real performance. Today we're looking at the ASUS P8H67-I which as you can possibly tell from the name, is based on the H67 chipset.

It's not the most high end chipset on the market, but what it does allow is for us to use those higher end 1155 processors like the 2600k. The other big appeal is that it uses a proper x16 PCIe slot which means that higher end video cards like the GTX 580 we use shouldn't be hindered even though the board is smaller.

Anyway, we'll find out what's going on with the board and its performance in a moment, but first we'll check out the package. Once that's done we'll take a closer look at the board before getting into the BIOS side of things. Then it's time to get into the testbed and see just what kind of performance we're able to get out of the P8H67-I.

Firstly, let's find out if good things do indeed come in small packages.

The Package

ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 03
ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 04

With the board being so small, the box itself is of course quite small. You can see this one uses the newer B3 revision which means that the initial SATA port problem isn't going to be present.

ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 05

As for the bundle, there's not a lot going on with a user guide, quick start guide, driver CD, two SATA cables and a back I/O plate. It's a pretty small bundle, but it doesn't come as a surprise considering the board we're dealing with.

The Motherboard

Looking at the board, you can pretty much see everything clearly in just a single shot. The main thing is that it's just so small, though, coming in at 17.1cm x 17.1cm. Moving in a bit closer and taking the time to look around the board, we can start to see everything in a bit more detail.

ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 06
ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 07

In the expansion department we've got just a single PCIe slot that runs at x16. While there's not much going on down here, the inclusion of a proper x16 slot wired at x16 is a nice addition. Most of the time we see a x16 slot wired at only x4 on these mITX boards and in that situation you do really see a drop in performance when compared to a slot running at x8 or x16.

ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 08

Turning the corner, we've got two RAM slots that support up to 16GB of memory at 1333MHz DDR. Below that we've got our 24-Pin ATX connector and to the left of that we've got our front panel connector. The only other stand out is just above the RAM slots which shows our battery placed in a slightly different way because of the board being so small.

ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 09

Across the top where we'd normally see our CPU socket etc. we instead have six SATA ports. Two are SATA III while four are SATA II of which all run off the H67 chipset. Also around here, we've got two fan headers and to the right we have two USB headers.

ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 10

Around the CPU area you can see for such a small board it's actually fairly clean. Of course, everything is quite close, but that's to be expected on such a small board. To the left you can also see our CPU power connector which in this case is a 4-Pin one instead of the normal 8-Pin we see on higher end boards.

ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 11

Looking at the I/O side of things, we've got a combo PS/2 port along with six USB 2.0 ports. Moving along, we've an optical port along with HDMI, DVI and VGA for video connectivity. We've got a further two USB ports, but these two blue ones are USB 3.0. Above that, we've got a Gigabit networking port running off the Realtek 8111E controller and finally we finish off with three audio jacks which run off the VIA 8-channel audio codec.

BIOS

Like we've been seeing from ASUS for months now, the P8H67-I uses the same UEFI layout that we've become so accustomed to seeing. When you first enter the BIOS you're greeted with EZ Mode which kind of limits what you can do, but you're only a few clicks from jumping into Advanced mode.

ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 12
ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 13
ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 14
ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 15
ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 16
ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 17
ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 18
ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 19

While Advanced mode is of course more advanced than EZ Mode, being based on the H67 chipset and being a more mid-range to low-end offering means there's not heaps of options to mess around with. The biggest loss on the on the H67 chipset is that even with K series CPUs, you're unable to adjust the multiplier. That means overclocking is of course limited to BCLK adjustment only.

Test System Setup

ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 99

We would like to thank the following companies for supplying and supporting us with our test system hardware and equipment: Intel, ASUS, MSI, Western Digital and Corsair.

We'll be using our new testbed setup today, but due to the fact we're still kind of limited to the motherboards we've tested on the new setup, we will be only including the Maximus IV Extreme-Z to give us an idea of how the H67 performs at stock against the Z68 based motherboard.

On the overclocking side of things, we decided to just skip it due to the simple fact that as we mentioned earlier, the H67 chipset doesn't allow you to change the multiplier on the K series CPU.

Because we would be talking of an overclock that would equate to only a 100MHz or two, we figured we'd just instead opt to run the board at default and see how it performs against the bigger Maximus IV Extreme-Z at stock.

Let's get started!

CPU Benchmarks

HyperPi 0.99

Version and / or Patch Used: 0.99

Developer Homepage: www.virgilioborges.com.br

Product Homepage: www.virgilioborges.com.br

Download It Here

HyperPi is a front end for SuperPi that allows for multiple concurrent instances of SuperPi to be run on each core recognized by the system. It is very dependent on CPU to memory to HDD speed. The faster these components, the faster it is able to figure out the number Pi to the selected length.

For our testing we use the 32M run. This means that each of the four physical and four logical cores for the i7 and the four physical cores of the i5 is trying to calculate the number Pi out to 32 million decimal places. Each "run" is a comparative to ensure accuracy and any stability or performance issues in the loop mentioned above will cause errors in calculation.

ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 30

You can see under Hyper PI our little P8H67-I offers us strong performance when at stock.

AIDA64

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.00.1035BETA

Developer Homepage: http://www.aida64.com

Product Homepage: http://www.AIDA64.com

Buy It Here

Replacing Everest in our labs is AIDA64. This new testing suite is from the core development team from Lavalys and continues that tradition. The guys have thrown in better support for multithreaded CPUs as well as full 64 bit support. We use this to test memory and HDDs for now, but may find ourselves opening this up to other areas of the motherboard.

ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 31
ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 32

The same strong performance can be seen under AIDS64 when comparing the stock performance to that of our Z68.

System Benchmarks

PCMark 7

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.04

Developer Homepage: http://www.pcmark.com

Product Homepage: http://www.pcmark.com

Buy It Here

PCMark 7 includes a range of tests that give different views of your system's performance. In the Advanced Edition you can choose which tests to run. The common use and hardware component tests are unavailable in the Basic Edition.

Overall system performance is measured by the PCMark test. This is the only test that returns an official PCMark score. The Lightweight test measures the system capabilities of entry-level systems and mobility platforms unable to run the PCMark test, but it does not generate a PCMark score.

Common use performance is measured by the scenario tests - Entertainment, Creativity and Production - each of which results in a scenario score.

Hardware component performance is measured by the hardware tests - Computation and Storage - each of which results in a hardware score.

ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 33

Looking at PCMark 7, you can see that performance is near identical at stock with nothing but 2 points separating the two setups.

MediaEspresso

Version and / or Patch Used: 6.5

Developer Homepage: http://www.cyberlink.com/

Product Homepage: http://www.cyberlink.com/products/mediaespresso/overview_en_AU.html?fileName=overview&r=1

Buy It Here

MediaEspresso is a blazingly fast media universal converter that can transcode your videos, photos and music files and out put them to a huge range of portable devices including mobile phones, portable media players and even game consoles. With technologies like Smart Detect, Direct Sync and CyberLink's TrueTheaterâ„¢ video enhancements, you can not only forget about complicated format, resolution and output settings, but your converted file will come out the other side looking better than when it went in!

ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 34

Firing up MediaEspresso, we can see our encode time is a bit longer at just under 23 minutes. Overall, though, the encode time isn't too bad when you consider you're converting a 1080p movie down to an iPad 2 friendly format.

USB 2.0 and 3.0 Benchmarks

AIDA64

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.70.1400

Developer Homepage: http://www.aida64.com

Product Homepage: http://www.AIDA64.com

Buy It Here

Replacing Everest in our labs is AIDA64. This new testing suite is from the core development team from Lavalys and continues that tradition. The guys have thrown in better support for multithreaded CPUs as well as full 64 bit support. We use this to test memory and HDDs for now, but may find ourselves opening this up to other areas of the motherboard.

ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 35
ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 36

USB 2.0 performance is very strong and USB 3.0 performance lines up with our USB 3.0 performance on the Maximus IV Extreme-Z.

SSD Benchmarks

AIDA64

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.70.1400

Developer Homepage: http://www.aida64.com

Product Homepage: http://www.AIDA64.com

Buy It Here

Replacing Everest in our labs is AIDA64. This new testing suite is from the core development team from Lavalys and continues that tradition. The guys have thrown in better support for multithreaded CPUs as well as full 64 bit support. We use this to test memory and HDDs for now, but may find ourselves opening this up to other areas of the motherboard.

ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 37

We can see hard drive performance between both setups is very similar; the P8H67-I is a little slower, but only by a few MB/s.

HD Tune Pro

Version and / or Patch Used: 4.61

Developer Homepage: http://www.hdtune.com

Product Homepage: http://www.hdtune.com

Buy It Here

HD Tune Pro gives us accurate read, write and access time results and for the last couple of years has been gaining popularity amongst reviewers. It is now considered a must have application for storage device testing.

ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 38

HD Tune Pro paints the same picture with the hard drive performance being quite similar between both setups and nothing more than a bit of fluctuation being seen.

Memory Benchmarks

AIDA64

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.00.1035BETA

Developer Homepage: http://www.aida64.com

Product Homepage: http://www.AIDA64.com

Buy It Here

Replacing Everest in our labs is AIDA64. This new testing suite is from the core development team from Lavalys and continues that tradition. The guys have thrown in better support for multithreaded CPUs as well as full 64 bit support. We use this to test memory and HDDs for now, but may find ourselves opening this up to other areas of the motherboard.

ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 39

Due to the fact that the system can only run at 1333MHz DDR instead of 2133MHz DDR like our Maximus IV Extreme-Z, we indeed see that on a whole memory performance is slightly down. Especially in the read and copy department.

Gaming Benchmarks

3DMark 11

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.0

Developer Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com

Product Homepage: http://www.3dmark.com/3dmark11/

Buy It Here

3DMark 11 is the latest version of the world's most popular benchmark. Designed to measure your PC's gaming performance 3DMark 11 makes extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to consistently and reliably test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 40

Metro 2033

Version and / or Patch Used: Latest Steam Update

Timedemo or Level Used: Built in Benchmark

Developer Homepage: http://www.4a-games.com//

Product Homepage: http://www.thqnordic.com/

Metro 2033 is an action-oriented video game with a combination of survival horror and first-person shooter elements. The game is based on the novel Metro 2033 by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky. It was developed by 4A Games in Ukraine and released in March 2010 for Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360.[3] In March 2006, 4A Games announced a partnership with Glukhovsky to collaborate on the game.[4] The game was announced at the 2009 Games Convention in Leipzig;[5] a first trailer came along with the announcement.[6] A sequel was announced, currently titled Metro: Last Light.

ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 41

While much smaller than the Maximus IV Extreme-Z, thanks to that proper x16 slot present on the board and the 2600k performing just as well at stock, we can see that performance between both setups is very close to each other.

Temperature and Power

Power Draw Tests

ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 42

Overall we can see that power draw is slightly lower on our P8H67-I. It comes as no surprise since the board is smaller and has less components on it.

Core Temperature

ASUS P8H67-I (Intel H67) Mini ITX Motherboard Review 43

Heat between both boards is very similar, we can see at idle there's nothing separating them and at load the P8H67-I actually comes in just a few degrees cooler.

Final Thoughts

The biggest down fall to the P8H67-I is the fact that it indeed lacks the ability to adjust the multiplier on the K series CPU. Saying that, we knew this before we got the board and it's not a limitation of the board itself, but the chipset by Intel.

From our testing we know that at stock most of our P67 / Z68 boards perform almost identical to each other. Paying more for one board over another usually does two things, bring with it more features and the more expensive boards carry better cooling around the CPU area which normally allow for a higher overclock. We saw that with the Maximus IV Extreme-Z which allowed us to achieve 5.38GHz.

At stock, you can see that the P8H67-I manages to perform well; it actually performs in line with more expensive boards. Of course, it's limited by overclocking, and being a mITX board, features are a little lacking. In this case, though, it's really only connectivity and to be completely honest, the size of the board is a feature in itself and if you're looking for a mITX solution, then it fits the bill perfectly.

What surprises me is the fact that in our video card testing the board performs just as well when running at stock. We've already mentioned this, but due to the fact the board carries a x16 slot that is wired at x16, the performance is extremely strong and you can see even with a high end card like the GTX 580, the performance lines up with other boards using the 2600k CPU and a GTX 580.

Paired up with something like the i3 based line from Intel, the P8H67-I has the ability to really be as powerful as you want it to be. The fact that it has no problem holding our Corsair H100 cooler and the GTX 580 is great - the fact that the whole thing performs like it does, though, is fantastic.

If you're looking for a mITX board that can pack a series punch and you have no need for overclocking, the P8H67-I is a fantastic option from ASUS. I think as the months go on, we'll see more and more companies offer us performance based mITX boards. While the expansion possibilities are indeed limited, they can handle a top end video card and teamed up with a good processor, you can see the performance we're able to get out of the system.

What do TweakTown.com awards mean? Click for details!

PRICING: You can find products similar to this one for sale below.

USUnited States: Find other tech and computer products like this over at Amazon.com

UKUnited Kingdom: Find other tech and computer products like this over at Amazon.co.uk

AUAustralia: Find other tech and computer products like this over at Amazon.com.au

CACanada: Find other tech and computer products like this over at Amazon.ca

DEDeutschland: Finde andere Technik- und Computerprodukte wie dieses auf Amazon.de

Shawn takes care of all of our video card reviews. From 2009, Shawn is also taking care of our memory reviews, and from May 2011, Shawn also takes care of our CPU, chipset and motherboard reviews. As of December 2011, Shawn is based out of Taipei, Taiwan.

Newsletter Subscription
We openly invite the companies who provide us with review samples / who are mentioned or discussed to express their opinion. If any company representative wishes to respond, we will publish the response here. Please contact us if you wish to respond.