ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution

If you’re looking for a high-performance motherboard suited for work, and highly-threaded applications, the ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution motherboard might be a great option.

Introduction

ASUS has had some very successful workstation motherboards in the past. These motherboards provide features that are not normally seen on standard gaming or mainstream motherboards, and are server compatible for those looking into building cheaper server systems. ASUS Workstation motherboards are also famous for their multiple PCI-E slot support, allowing for extremely powerful systems with four Nvidia TESLA cards, or perhaps powerful server systems with multiple PCI-E SAS (Serial-Attached SCSI) RAID cards. Pairing up this motherboard with a powerful RAID card, a few server quality hard drives, and some other powerful hardware can produce an amazing server system that doesn’t need an expensive server motherboard.

Today we have another great motherboard from ASUS: the P8P67 WS Revolution – B3 Revision. This motherboard is designed for the latest Intel Sandy Bridge microarchitecture, running on the LGA 1155 platform. It also sports a revised P67 Cougar Town chipset, to fix the problems that prompted the recall. For those that don’t know about the Cougar Town recall, Intel had a major setback with the Sandy Bridge launch due to a chipset defect that would degrade the SATA III ports over time. With the B3 stepping motherboards, the problem is eliminated and the user is guaranteed to receive a fully functional chipset.

The P8P67 WS Revolution has some great features that only high-end P67 motherboards have. This includes the inclusion of the NF200 chip from NVIDIA, which provides users with high performance in graphics with 2-Way/3-Way SLI and Quad Quadro cards on demand. Though motherboards without the NF200 chip can do 2-way SLI, they cannot run 3-way SLI, and are limited by the PCI-E connectors they can use. ASUS managed to put up to 4 PCI-Express slots onto this ATX motherboard, which allows for support of even Quad-GPU CrossFireX for those looking into ATI/AMD solutions. One thing to note about this design is that while other motherboard manufacturers tried to accomplish this with their motherboards, they usually ended up going with an XL-ATX form factor (GIGABYTE X58A-UD9, G1.Assassin). With an XL-ATX motherboard, the user needs a special chassis, making it very inconvenient to build a system that will be fully compatible with what they need. Additionally, those parts can be extremely expensive, and may well exceed the budget for a user who is just trying to find the greatest deal for a 4 PCI-E motherboard solution. There are some mid-tower and several full-tower chassis that fit the P8P67 WS Revolution motherboard, and are compatible with 4 dual-slot video cards.

The P8P67 WS Revolution has 92% Power Efficiency, meaning that it comes with high quality components, like the Japanese solid state capacitors and very low resistance (Rds) MOSFETS. They last longer than standard mainstream P67 motherboards with better power efficiency to help reduce the expenses on the electricity bill, improve heat dissipation, lower capacitance, and increase longevity of component life cycles. Because there is higher resistance in thinner board designs, ASUS is following the same 2 oz copper inner board design that GIGABYTE has been using with their Ultra Durable 3 motherboards. However ASUS has its own special VRM design called the DIGI+ VRM, which helps achieve extremely high overclocks for the CPU. The DIGI+ VRM helps by adjusting PWM voltage and frequency modulation with minimal power loss through BIOS and ASUS’ AI Suite II software. These adjustments could lead to higher overclocking potential. Its spread spectrum option helps cut radiation interference by half to help with system stability when using the DIGI+ VRM frequency adjustments. We find the overclocking and DIGI+ VRM settings in the AI Suite II very useful for overclocking to high frequencies without needing to go into the BIOS.

ASUS uses Dual Intel Gigabit LAN rather than the Realtek LAN solution that most motherboards have. With Dual Gigabit LAN, users can experience double the bandwidth of standard Gigabit LAN that Realtek supports. The Intel based solution is hardware-accelerated, providing lower CPU utilization for better performance in network based applications. The Intel Gigabit LAN setup offers more options for the user than Realtek, making customization of the network much easier.

While the motherboard has all the latest features like USB 3.0 and SATA III, this motherboard in specific has four SATA 6Gb/s connectors with dual RAID support. Finally, one of the best features of ASUS P67 boards (including the P8P67 WS Revolution) is the EFI BIOS (EZ Mode). The EFI BIOS is a completely GUI-based BIOS with mouse support. By quick drag and drop actions, the user can easily set up their boot drive priority options and with a few clicks, can set up their whole system through nice drop down menu options. With the EFI BIOS, the user can also use hard drives over 2.2TB due to native support for hard drives larger than 2.2TB in 64-bit operating systems.

For the price of $259.99, the ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution motherboard might just be perfectly priced. Considering that this motherboard is full of features, has options that server systems will need, and specifications for high-end systems, the price of $259.99 is not too much for what you will be getting in this package.

Features & Specifications

Our analysis:

There are a few more features to the ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution that we would like to discuss. We really liked the addition of the USB 2.0 ports on the motherboard which are accessible from the inside of the PC. These USB 2.0 connectors, which are also called the Quick Gate ports, are nice features when the user wants to connect something to the PC via USB and keep it running all the time. While this is a nice feature, there could be another use for these ports. Some newer cases like the Thermaltake Level 10 GT, or the In-Win Dragon Rider come with prebuilt USB 3.0 cables inside the case that require the user to route the cables outside the system when they want to use those ports. The ports inside the chassis on the P8P67 WS Revolution motherboard could easily be used for this purpose, if they were USB 3.0. We would have been much more satisfied to see USB 3.0 ports placed instead of USB 2.0. Of course for most people this will not be a problem, because the people utilizing these features inside the PC will most likely be graphic designers, 3D modelers, and people working with CAD software. This function will provide a great way of hiding expensive products that they would not like to keep out on the table for easy steeling. So this feature is mainly for users working with Maya, Cinema 4D, XSI, Lightwave, 3DStudio Max, Solidworks, AutoCAD and other such applications.

The G.P. Diagnosis tool is an excellent add-on to the P8P67 WS Revolution motherboard. It helps especially when overclocking the systems or in the event of a hardware failure. The G.P. Diagnosis helps show error codes that can be looked up in the Motherboard’s Manual to understand where the problem is during booting. The G.P. Diagnosis also comes with power on/off and reset buttons, which are very useful for those using this motherboard on a testbench. The one con we observed about the G.P. Diagnosis is the poor placement of the pins on the motherboard. While it might not be such a bad placement for some, in other cases the PSU and other hardware get in the way of the pins, making it impossible to plug in the G.P. Diagnosis tool.

From ASUS’ Website:

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• Intel LGA1155 Platform / Intel® P67 Express Chipset/Nvidia NF200
• Ultimate Graphics Power with 3-Way/2-Way Geforce SLI™ and Quad Quadro cards on demand
• Platinum Level 92% Power Efficiency
• Intel® Ethernet technology-Built in dual Intel Lan
• EFI BIOS (EZ Mode) – Flexible & Easy BIOS Interface
• Quad SATA 6Gb/s with dual RAID Support – Double Access, Double Convenience

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Speficiations

Software Overview

AI Suite II

After installing the software components, a quick restart is needed. Then, on the taskbar, there is a little icon that will launch the AI SUITE II. By default, it will display a strip of icons for different functions. The software interface has a very fresh and easy to use GUI. One bug we noticed, which will get fixed in the future versions of AI Suite II was a weird black box with gray arrows on our 2nd monitor. Once AI Suite II is clicked on in the taskbar, this black box disappears and never appears again.

Clicking on each icon will display more options.

Probe II is the system monitoring tool ASUS provides. The software lets users monitor the voltage, temperature, fan speed of the board. Users can set a threshold for the safe value. The user can also set up alerts along with the threshold settings.

Right inside the AI Suite II, users can adjust the load-line calibration and the CPU current in the DIGI+ VRM menu. These options are also available in the BIOS. These options can help with overclocking the CPU to faster frequencies.

The EPU is an energy efficient tool. The tool provides different modes that users can pick depending on their usage need. Unfortunately the full functionality of the EPU will only work when the system is running under stock settings. With the EPU, the user can conserve electricity by lowering the performance of the system during idle or low load states.

Fan Xpert offers a GUI interface for those who want to fine-tune the fan speed and the system temperature. In addition to the CPU fan, there is one additional 4-pin chassis fan header. In addition to the CPU fan, one of the three pin fan headers and all the four pin fan headers can be monitored with the Fan Xpert. Some people may wish to have more fan control. The user can easily set up fan speed profiles depending on what they will be doing and to set a threshold for the fan speed if the user is very sensitive to fan noise.

The software also provides a very nice visual display of the system voltage and temperature log, allowing users to monitor the various components.

The TurboV EVO tool allows manual or automatic overclocking of the processor. Users can use it to adjust the BCLK frequency, CPU voltage, IMC voltage, and DRAM Bus voltage right from Windows. While the new BIOS offers a very easy to navigate interface, it is still nice to be able to overclock inside Windows. Users can choose between the manual or opt for the auto tuning to find the most stable overclocking result.

Here we have a closer look at the manual overclocking for the P8P67 WS Revolution motherboard. We can clearly see the BCLK Frequency, CPU Voltage and DDR Voltage, which are the three major settings that will help with overclocking the Sandy Bridge processors. The CPU Ratio tab provides the user with Multiplier customization. In this case we have raised the Multiplier from stock 34x to 50x, gaining roughly 1600MHz on each core.

This picture has additional information about the Advanced Mode section of the TurboV EVO Tab. This section gives the user more voltage customization, however we have not noticed much stability or overclocking gains from messing with the following voltages. These could come handy for those who want to also alter other hardware in their PCs.

This section of the AI Suite II allows the user to update the BIOS for the P8P67 WS Revolution motherboard. This section also provides additional booting options for the PC, where the user can set their own boot logo when the system is turned on.

Finally, the System Information tab in the AI Suite provides the user with such information as CPU-Z in the Motherboard, CPU and Memory tabs. These sections will give lots of information about the current hardware the user is running.

Overview of the P8P67 WS Revolution

• 1x 2-port USB 2.0 module and 1-port eSata module
• 4x Serial ATA 6.0 Gb/s signal cables
• 2x Serial ATA 3.0 Gb/s power cables
• 4x Serial ATA 3.0 Gb/s cables
• 1x ASUS Q-Shield (I/O Shield)
• 1x ASUS 2-in-1 Q-Connector Kit
• 1x G.P. Dignosis Card
• 1x ASUS SLI bridge connector
• 1x ASUS 3-Way SLi bridge card
• ASUS motherboard support DVD
• User Guide

A Closer Look

BIOS

Main

Ai Tweaker

Advanced

The Advanced menu is where users get to adjust the different components on the motherboard. The CPU Configuration is where users can adjust the number of active cores, virtualizations, thermal throttling, and power management of the processor. The SATA Configuration needs no introduction. We liked that ASUS set AHCI as the default setting, and let the user choose for which hard drive to enable “Hot Plug”. The Onboard Devices Configuration Menu is where users can adjust the various devices such as FireWire, HD Audio, eSATA, and Network for the board. It may be hard to recognize, but APM stands for Advanced Power Management, which allows users to adjust the power on setting.

Monitor, Boot, Tool & Exit

Overclocking

Overclocking on the ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution motherboard was very fun. This motherboard has been very easy to overclock, especially with its OC Tuner function in the BIOS, or the Auto Tune option in AI Suite II. With Manual control, we went ahead and overclocked the processor as far as we could, and we were able to reach 100% stable frequency of 5.1GHz with 51x Multiplier and 100.1 BCLK. We could have slightly adjusted the BCLK, however, this can make the system less stable with certain hardware.

It seems the voltages reported by CPU-Z are not quite on part with what we had it set up as. The voltages were around 1.3-1.32V during these tests.

Temperatures

The temperatures were recorded with CoreTemp while running LinX for a few hours during stability tests and double checking the results with OCCT for 20 minutes right after LinX finished its stress test. The processor was fully overclocked. The results were recorded carefully. After the results were recorded, we waited for 30 minutes before taking Idle temperature measurements. The results were as follows:

The ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution motherboard ran a bit warm compared to previous ASUS boards like the ASUS P8P67 Pro and Deluxe. On the other hand it still ran cooler than the GIGABYTE P67A-UD7, which is GIGABYTE’s top of the line P67 motherboard. Considering that the P8P67 WS Revolution is extremely similar to the UD7 performance-wise, and that it has some better features that we talked about on the previous pages, the motherboard still ran cooler. This will really only come down to the components that each manufacturer uses and their cooling solution.

Power Consumption

The power consumption was tested while running LinX for a few minutes at stock settings. The results were recorded carefully with a Kill-A-Watt power consumption measuring tool at the wall. After the results were recorded, we waited for yet another few minutes minutes before taking Idle power consumption measurements.

One very nice feature of ASUS motherboards is high efficiency in power consumption. We can clearly see that even with same hardware, the P8P67 WS Revolution motherboard is still 9W lower in power consumption than the P67A-UD7-B3 motherboard. While the UD4-B3 is close to the P8P67 WS Revolution, the UD4 is a mainstream motherboard and does not utilize the NF200 chip along with other high end features.

Testing & Methodology

(Water Cooling setup provided by AcousticPC.com)

We’ve expanded our testing suite considerably for the P67 chipset, and will continue to use the same methods for most of the motherboards and CPU’s we test. In the interests of thoroughness and accurate results, we run each test at least three times, and some tests more than that. We average the total of all the tests from each benchmark then report the average here.

The OS we use is Windows 7 Pro 64bit with all patches and updates applied. We also use the latest drivers available for the motherboard and any devices attached to the computer. We do not disable background tasks or tweak the OS or system in any way. We turn off drive indexing and daily defragging. We also turn off Prefetch and Superfetch. This is not an attempt to produce bigger benchmark numbers. Drive indexing and defragging can interfere with testing and produce confusing numbers. If a test were to be run while a drive was being indexed or defragged, and then the same test was later run when these processes were off, the two results would be contradictory and erroneous. As we cannot control when defragging and indexing occur precisely enough to guarantee that they won’t interfere with testing, we opt to disable the features entirely.

Prefetch tries to predict what users will load the next time they boot the machine by caching the relevant files and storing them for later use. We want to learn how the program runs without any of the files being cached, and we disable it so that each test run we do not have to clear pre-fetch to get accurate numbers. Lastly we disable Superfetch. Superfetch loads often-used programs into the memory. It is one of the reasons that Windows occupies so much memory. Vista fills the memory in an attempt to predict what users will load. Having one test run with files cached, and another test run with the files un-cached would result in inaccurate numbers. Again, since we can’t control its timings so precisely, it we turn it off. Because these four features can potentially interfere with benchmarking, and and are out of our control, we disable them. We do not disable anything else.

Test Rig

Test Suite

We will use the following applications to test the performance of the Motherboard. Benchmarks

Sisoft Sandra 2011b

“SiSoftware Sandra (the System Analyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software. It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.”

Performance in CPU intensive applications does show a bit of improvement on the ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution motherboard over GIGABYTE’s top P67 models, but with the slight differences, we doubt users would notice a huge performance difference in most applications.

PCMark Vantage

PCMark Vantage is the latest system benchmark tool from Futuremark. The benchmark consists of tests such as application launches, file searches, web browsing, video playback, photo editing, and gaming.

PCMark Vantage showed a slight performance increase in overall tests on the WS Revolution board while we were running an overclocked system, but it seems that the ASUS board fell a bit behind under stock settings. Once again these numbers are so slightly apart that most users will never notice a performance difference between each motherboard.

Cinebench R10 and R11.5

“CINEBENCH is a real-world test suite that assesses your computer’s performance capabilities. MAXON CINEBENCH is based on MAXON’s award-winning animation software, CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Spider-Man, Star Wars, The Chronicles of Narnia and many more. MAXON CINEBENCH runs several tests on your computer to measure the performance of the main processor and the graphics card under real world circumstances. The benchmark application makes use of up to 16 CPUs or CPU cores and is available for Windows (32-bit and 64-Bit) and Macintosh (PPC and Intel-based). The resulting values among different operating systems are 100% comparable and therefore very useful with regard to purchasing decision-making. It can also be used as a marketing tool for hardware vendors or simply to compare hardware among colleagues or friends.”

Here comes the interesting part. Just as we saw a performance decrease in Cinebench R10 on the WS Revolution motherboard, we noticed the same performance decrease in Cinebench R11.5. It seems that in order to achieve the same performance as the GIGABYTE P67A motherboards did at 4.8GHz, we had to overclock the CPU to 4.9GHz. We are not quite sure why this motherboard fell behind in Multi-Threaded 3D rendering applications.

3DMark Vantage

For complete information on 3DMark Vantage Please follow this Link:

www.futuremark.com/benchmarks/3dmarkvantage/features/

The newest video benchmark from the gang at Futuremark. This utility is still a synthetic benchmark, but one that more closely reflects real world gaming performance. While it is not a perfect replacement for actual game benchmarks, it has its uses. We tested our cards at the ‘Performance’ setting.

3DMark 11 

Crysis warhead

Crysis Warhead is the much anticipated standalone expansion to Crysis, featuring an updated CryENGINE™ 2 with better optimization. It was one of the most anticipated titles of 2008.

We ran Warhead using gamer’s setting at resolution of 1280×1024 and DirectX 10. We tested both no AA an 2x AA.

When benchmarking video games at lower settings to make sure there are no video card bottlenecks during our testing, we can see a nice jump in gaming performance from stock to overclocked settings. The performance difference between each motherboard on the other hand is not much different.

Just Cause 2

Unigine Heaven is a benchmark that gives us consistent results all the time. We can re-bench each motherboard several times and we will get exactly the same results as our previous tests have shown. Because of consistent results in each run, having different scores in these tests just shows how nicely some motherboards scale in graphics performance. In this case, the ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution showed a big jump over the GIGABYTE motherboards in stock settings, but visually, the performance was exactly the same.

Conclusion

While the ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution motherboard has some very nice features, a great motherboard layout, excellent PCI-Express spacing for up to four Multi-GPU configuration, EFI BIOS with EZ Mode and the powerful AI Suite II software to maintain and control all aspects of the system, there were a few drawbacks that need to be mentioned. While the P8P67 WS Revolution motherboard was designed for 3D/CAD users in mind, or perhaps for people using the system as a small server, the Quick Gate USB 2.0 ports on the motherboard should have been USB 3.0 using the Renesas USB3.0 controller. At the moment these ports serve a great purpose for users that want to keep devices in the system that they don’t want others to have access to; however, these ports could have been slightly better utilized: users with front panel USB 3.0 connectors could plug in their USB 3.0 cables straight inside the chassis instead of having to loop back at the rear of their chassis.

Another small issue that we encountered during our testing was that the G.P. Diagnosis card did not fit completely. The G.P. Dignosis card helps users with debugging boot errors and also provides the user with a power on/off and reset switch. Unfortunately, for us, the placement was not in the best place, because our power supply and other components would get in the way. It would have been nice if ASUS could have included a cable or some sort of attachment that would allow the user to place the G.P. Diagnosis card somewhere else in the system, perhaps attach it to one of the extra motherboard holes that are reserved for Extended ATX motherboards. As far as we know though this is not the main feature of the P8P67 WS Revolution motherboard, so it is not that big of a deal.

Moving on to the software side of the motherboard, the Ai Suite II had some excellent features that we were not expecting to work very well, but it ended up being the main way we configured our system. Till this point, we were hesitant to use Windows based software to rely on overclocking the processor and other components in our  system. However with the introduction of Digi+ VRM and the incorporation of all the overclocking and Digi+ VRM settings in the AI Suite II application, overclocking the Intel i7 2600K processor became extremely simple. Within 2-3 minutes, we were up and running at 5.1GHz and our stress tests proved that the system can run completely stable for over 10 hours at around 1.3-1.32V. To stay on the safe side though, we used ASUS’ built in OC Tuner, which set us at 4.3GHz at first, but after switching out the memory and going with a higher performance memory kit, we were able to reach 4.6GHz without needing to mess with anything in the system. The OC Tuner also made sure that none of the voltages were outside Intel’s specifications and that the system would not be damaged during this process. Unfortunately, there are a few little bugs that we noticed, but ASUS has been notified and they are working on the problem. One of the problems we noticed was that if the user has a dual-monitor setup, there is a little black box shown on the 2nd monitor that the user cannot get rid of until either Ai Suite II is turned off, or until the user opens up the software from the taskbar. It is possible to disable Ai Suite II during start-up, which would prevent this problem from happening. There was another slight problem were even after resetting the software to its stock settings, the OC profile would still load during start-up. We had to uninstall and reinstall AI Suite II to fix this problem. On the other hand, to finalize the AI Suite II application, the user also gets full control over fan profiles, has a clear overview of the system voltages and temperatures, and also has easy BIOS update tools for their system.

Finally, some of the main points that we enjoyed on the ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution motherboard were the Dual Intel Gigabit LAN support, four SATA III ports for double RAID support, PWM fan headers, 2/3-way SLI or 4-way CrossFireX support on a standard ATX motherboard, and excellent component spacing around the CPU socket. With good spacing for the components, we were able to easily install our HeatKiller water block without damaging components. Unfortunately, GIGABYTE motherboards have this problem, so we would recommend ASUS motherboards for those looking into doing high-end cooling or perhaps using large water blocks for their CPUs. The VRM design was also very nice, however the cooling was not perfect as we have shown on the Closer Look page of this review.

The price tag of $259.99 at Newegg.com is not too bad considering what the motherboard comes with feature wise. It definitely has aspects that only high-end motherboards would have in the $300 range, and even server based features. However, those not looking to use four PCI-Express slots all at once, or if the Intel based LAN is not a necessity, we would recommend looking at the the ASUS P8P67 Pro motherboard. That motherboard does not come with the NF200 chipset, but should have just as good performance in most non-3D based applications.