ASRock P67 Extreme4 (Intel P67 Express) Motherboard Review

ASRock P67 Extreme4 Review – Introduction
Bluetooth 14 Dec 2010 (updated 18 Jan 2011)

ASRock, the innovative motherboard will be releasing a series of Intel p67 boards. This is a mid range board from ASRock that is geared for the LGA1155 processors. Being a mid range board, the price would be more affordable compared to the FATAL1TY board we reviewed some time ago. The fundamentals are the same as they are both using the same chipset. It is just some FATAL1TY features are removed from this vanilla board.

The motherboard is a full ATX form factor board with all solid caps design. It also uses an advanced V8 + 2 Power Phase Design. In terms of memory capacity, it can support up to Dual Channel DDR3-2133 (OC) of up to a total of 32GB.

On board, there are 3 x PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots (PCIE2/PCIE4: single at x16 or dual at x8/x8 mode; PCIE5: x4 mode),  2 x PCI Express 2.0 x1 slots and  2 x PCI slots. The P67 Extreme4 supports either Quad CrossFireX / 3 way CrossFire / CrossFire or Quad SLI / 3 way SLI / SLI.

In terms of audio, it supports 7.1 CH HD Audio with Content Protection (Realtek ALC892 Audio Codec),  Premium Blu-ray audio support and THX TruStudio PRO.

For connectivity, it has PCIE x1 Gigabit LAN 10/100/1000 Mb/s based on Realtek RTL8111E. There are 6 USB 2.0 ports, 1 x eSATA3 Connector,  2 x Ready-to-Use USB 3.0 Ports (using Etrontech) , 1394,  1 x Coaxial SPDIF Out Port,  1 x Optical SPDIF Out Port. There are also  4 x SATA2 3.0 Gb/s connectors, support RAID (RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10, RAID 5 and Intel® Rapid Storage)NCQ, AHCI and Hot Plug and 4 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s connectors.

On top of all these, the board supports Dr. Debug, Smart Switch Design Dr. Debug, Smart Switch Design, Power/Reset/Clear CMOS Switch with LED. It also supports ASRock Extreme Tuning Utility (AXTU), Instant Boot, Instant Flash, Good Night LED, Multi-Fan Speed Control, AIWI, APP Charger, SmartView and a new UEFI GUI BIOS.

I personally feel that the  Combo Cooler Option (C.C.O.) is one of the best feature on board as it allows you to reuse your old LGA775 heatsink on the new board. Theother nice add on is the Front USB 3.0 Panel which supports 2 x USB 3.0 ports and provides a 2.5” SSD/HDD rack.The package bundles in  Free Software : CyberLink DVD Suite – OEM and Trial,  Free Gift : 1 x ASRock SLI_Bridge_2S Card , 1 x Front USB 3.0 Panel, 1 x Rear USB 3.0 Bracket.