ASRock P67 Extreme4 (Intel P67 Express) Motherboard Review

Conclusion

 ASRock P67 Extreme4 is the mid range board from ASRock’s series of Intel P67 Express chipset mainboards. Although it may not have the rich feature set of the ASRock P67 FATAL1TY, it is pretty complete compared to the gaming board. Features wise, it has the necessary connectors for future expansion. It has the GbE LAN (no teaming), front USB 3.0, eSATA, SPDIF, SATA 6Gbps. For debugging purposes, there is also Dr. Debug, Smart Switch, 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.

Installation is a breeze for this motherboard as it supports 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. This definitely helps you to save more money than to buy a new heatsink if you haven’t got one yet.

Performance wise, this board is speedy with it’s P1.40 BIOS just downloaded from the ASRock website.  We are pretty surprised by the performance as it is on par or better than the ASUS P8P670Pro and ASRock FATAL1TY P67 board in a number of benchmarks. Perhaps the ASRock team has found a way to tune up the 3D performance. In addition, the XFast USB technology also speeds up the performance of disk access. You can check out the numbers here.

Overclocking features are very complete with it’s UEFI BIOS. Voltage levels are available to stablise the overclocking at higher speeds. Unfortunately, our Engineering sample processor isn’t that overclocking friendly. We could only do 4.8GHz which is slightly better than the other boards we have so far. Below is a screen shot showing the voltage levels applied to the processor and board.

Packaging is pretty complete with the front usb 3.0 rack and the necessary connectors for CrossFireX. Perhaps ASRock can save some trees and weight by cutting down on it’s 300 pages multi language manual.

In conclusion, I think this board is pretty feature pack and performance is amazing. As it is a mid range board, it would be reasonably priced for the mass market. If you do not need the bell and whistles of the high end boards, I will highly recommend this board. 

Pros

C.C.O for LGA775 heatsink support

Front USB 3.0

Cons

 NIL

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10.