For our second review of 2011 we thought we would take a look at a P67 board (despite all the drama). We chose the Asus P8P67 WS Revolution. This board (like you did not know) is part of Asus’ workstation line up, but that does not mean that it is boring. In fact the WS Revolution is anything but boring. It has been built with the professional enthusiast in mind. You get items like an NF200 chip to help support three way SLI and Crossfire, a 92% power efficiency rating, multiple SATA 3.0 ports (supported by Intel and Marvell), and dual Intel GBe LAN ports. But there is more to it than just the sum of its features. You also get an improved VRM (voltage regulation module), thicker traces for better signal transfer and quite a bit more. With all of this waiting to be tried out, let’s quit the intro chatter and dive into the P8P67 WS Revolution.
Features-In the current market motherboard (and indeed almost all component) performance is very close. The days of a large performance advantage between boards using the same chipset are long gone. That is unless someone makes a HUGE mistake (like runs traces completely wrong). Now, the thing that differentiates different products is the features. These are things like power management, extra slots, better audio CODECs etc. It is these items that R&D teams work so hard to drop into what are really identical pieces of hardware at their most basic level.Asus is one of those companies that will really load you up with features. Some of them are great, others well… they are not so wonderful. Do let’s take a look at the features of the P8P67 WS Revolution and see how they fall into place.Excellent Asus Digi+ VRMThree-way SLI / CrossfireQuick Gate (USB Ports on the board)AI Suite IIAsus EFI BIOSTPU + EPUOk each of these are features that really add value to the WS Revolution. When you break it down like this there are not many, but the ones that are here in this upper category are pretty good. The Digi+ VRM is not a new feature but one that Asus is pushing down from the ROG line up into the consumer level products. It allows for very granular control over the power settings, including being able to control the frequency of the power regulators. The TPU module is what makes overclocking Asus boards so easy while the TPU module and EPU module combined make up one of the best power management designs we have seen lately. In the middle (sort of good)Asus Fan XpertAsus WS Heartbeat (LEDs that pulse on and off)MemOk!Asus SASsaby SupportG.P Diagnostic CardIn the happy middle ground we find a decent list of features. These are the ones that could influence your decision to buy but are not major motivations. The Asus Fan Xpert is here because of the improvements that Asus has made to this feature. Most notably you can now manually control the chassis fans in the same way you can control the CPU fan.Floor MatsASUS EZ Flash 2ASUS CrashFree BIOS 3Q-Fan PlusASUS Q-ConnectorASUS Q-LEDASUS Q-SlotASUS Q-DIMMThese items are nice, but let’s face it; they are on just about every Asus motherboard in existence (with the exception of the very low end. They are really not going to sway you one way or the other.
