I have to say this micro ATX motherboard has a lot of features. Take for instance it has a single channel of EIDE good for two devices plus 6 SATA ports. Two of the ports are SATA 3 with the other four being SATA 2 and can be configured for RAID. In the back there are two USB 3 as well as four USB 2 ports. On the motherboard itself there are five headers that provides a total of 10 additional USB2 ports as well as a series and parallel printer port in the form of a header. But to use these you have to buy the optional connectors. Being a micro ATX motherboard there are only four slots for add-ons and they are starting at the top, a 16 X PCI express version 2 slot for a video card, two PCI slots and on the bottom there is a 4X PCI express version 2 slot for a second video card or PCI express device. An onboard eight channel HD audio and gigabit LAN. There are also three fan headers, a four terminal CPU, a second four terminal one for a case fan and a third three terminal one that can be used for the second case fan. The three fans are monitor in the bios for speed and the one with the four terminal can be controlled. This motherboard no longer has any ports for a floppy drive since that device is basically obsolete. The nice feature is it still retained a single channel of EIDE which is ideal in my situation since I can still continue to use my existing EIDE optical drives. Another thing that will become obsolete on future motherboards is the PS-2 ports being used by the mouse and keyboard being replaced by USB ones. This motherboard only has one PS-2 port being label as a combination which is good for you to use either a mouse or keyboard but not both. This is the reason why I have to buy a USB mouse.
After this upgrade and reinstallation of Windows the computer was much more enjoyable to use particularly on video editing and ripping. Since I have the retail version of Windows 7 ultimate, I didn't have any problem activating Windows. The speed of this thing is phenomenal under most use it's very hard to actually to pin it at full CPU load. And on most work load, it actually uses less electrical power to run then lesser CPU. This goes to show how they improved efficiency. This motherboard is not very good for overclocking. It came with software that allows minor overclocking. Using this program it was possible to do stable overclocking to 3.5 GHz using the Core i7 2600k. When combined with Turbo, up to 3.9 GHz. Since this computer computer is so fast, for my use it's not necessary to even consider overclocking but to use the default setting. Using the easy setting in the bios there are three choices: power saving, normal which is the default and stable overclocked setting. One really power saving feature that I really like is the total power shutdown when the computer goes to sleep. When it was set to automatically goes to sleep after a certain amount of time of inactivity, everything shuts down. When that happens the computer go completely silence with only a blinking light on the front panel. Even the power supply fan is shutdown. For me, it's possible to put this computer to sleep by just pressing the sleep button on my keyboard.
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E. Mildenhall
ASUS P8H67-M PRO Motherboard and Intel i5 CPU
Reviewed in Canada on September 20, 2012