We’ve already covered the extreeeemely awesome new Republic of Gamers boards, the Maximus IV Extreme, in our earlier preview, but how how about something a little less “evening in a mosh pit”, more, “Michelin star restaurant, before retiring to bar overlooking the city”?
ASUS’ Deluxe model in the series is, as usual, kitted to the point of bursting with features. The new P8P67 series board uses the Intel P67 chipset and ASUS’ revolutionary 16+2 phase DIGI+ VRM power hardware, so you can still overclock to your completely satisfy your performance needs, but that’s not really all this board is about.
P8P67 Deluxe heatsinks
The tech list includes:
Two PCI-Express 2.0 16x slots that can run in with 16x or both at 8x-8x for Nvidia SLI and AMD CrossFire, multi-GPU support;
One PCI-Express 2.0 16x slot – 4x electrical support (longer cards are always backwards compatible)
Two PCI-Express 2.0 1x slots and two legacy PCI slots
Eight SATA ports: four 6Gbps ports (two from Intel in grey and two from Marvell in navy blue) and four SATA 3Gbps (from Intel in blue) and two eSATA 3Gbps ports (JMicron) – one of which is powered eSATA (so doubles as a normal USB port). Fast storage, RAID storage, external storage: all covered.
Dual Gigabit Ethernet LAN, one of which uses the faster Intel chip native to the chipset, giving more performance and less CPU use.
There’s integrated Bluetooth, which has its own Windows software set and seven different functions; shot & send (send a photo from your phone camera to the PC), BT transfer (treat your phone like a flash drive), Folder Sync (phone file backup), Personal Manager (for contact and calenders), BT to Net (teathering via Bluetooth), music player (play music on your PC stored on your phone) and BT Turbo Remote (use your phone as a remote control for the Deluxes’ features). It comes with it’s own manual to explain them all too, so don’t worry.
Realtek 8-chennel High-Definition audio codec with Blu-ray content protection (required to play Blu-ray media on your PC speakers) and ‘DTS Surround Sensation UltraPC’, as well as S/PDIF out options too if you’re connecting it up to a separate amp.
P8P67 Deluxe rear I/O
We’re not done yet, as there’s also four USB 3 ports: two on the rear I/O and two via an internal connector that the bundled front adapter can use, a couple of Firewire ports, 12 USB 2.0 ports, and that’s before we get to the ASUS stuff, which is:
The new EPU and TPU plus their respective Turbo Key II and EPU switches; MemOK failsafe button; and ASUS’ latest AI Suite II and brand new EFI BIOS software tie all this together.
The P8P67 Deluxe features Dual Intelligent Processors 2
Deluxe enough? I’d certainly say so!