Good "lowend" P67 board?

scooby609

scooby609

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 20, 2007
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184
Hey guys I need a bit of help ... I'm looking to build a sandy bridge set up to replace my old e6600 set up, but I don't have tons of cash.

What I am looking for is a good cheap P67 board, that's good for overclocking, has good on-board sound & lan. I don't need crossfire or SLI as I'll only be useing 1 GPU.

Any suggestions please ?
 
Biostar's P67 looks good, has features, but they do like two ATX12V connectors if you're oc'ing, but it's about $159. The Gigabyte P67-UD4 (the one I got) looks good too and has features like SLI / Xfire and is $189.
 
I'm thinking about the asrock p67 extreme4. Bonuses for being able to use lga775 coolers and comes with a usb 3.0 mounting bracket that internally mounts a 2.5" drive.
 
I'm thinking of getting either an Asrock P76 Pro or Pro3. The Pro3 goes for $114 in newegg. Unless I can find the Pro at less then $100, I'll probablye get the pro3
 
hOrnizuka said:
How useful or important is the UEFI(bios?)? I believe UD3 don't have this feature.
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None of the Gigabyte boards have it. It is future proofing, for the most part - no real benefit right now (except the native ability to boot 3TB drives - which Gigabyte claims their boards can do also).
 
The ASUS P8P67-M is now up at newegg for $130, not as inexpensive as I had hoped.

Looks like Intel has the cheapest P67 boards (on newegg at the moment, anyway) at $115 for the DP67DE (microATX) and $117 for the DP67BA (ATX). All Intel P67 and H67 boards have UEFI. The only difference between the DP67DE and DP67BA is that the DE has only one PCI slot while the BA has three.

To the OP: a review of Intel's P67 motherboards said about the on-board sound that "the integrated audio can't encode multi-channel bitstreams or virtualize surround-sound speakers."

Under $115 is H67 territory (integrated video, no ability to overclock K series CPUs).

EDIT: The DP67DE has a PCI-E 2.0 slot, not a 1.x slot as I posted earlier.
 
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hOrnizuka said:
How useful or important is the UEFI(bios?)? I believe UD3 don't have this feature.
Click to expand...

Unimportant, really, as the only OS that requires EFI is Apple's OS X, and even it can be worked around on standard (non-EFI) motherboards. While Windows Vista, Windows 7, and some FOSS distributions can be installed on EFI-based boards, none require it, even in x64 iterations.

From what I am seeing, those that will have the easiest SB transition are those that are running DDR3 memory already (while the drives and cards will transfer from an LGA775 system, as sometimes the PSU will as well, DDR2 memory won't).

Also, Intel seems bound and determined to force the issue, and especially for us laggards. (I was hoping to skip SB as I had skipped the first-gen i-series; however, with the death of E3xx0 and Q8xxx/9xxx, I'm out of options if I stay with Intel.)
 
evilsofa said:
The ASUS P8P67-M is now up at newegg for $130, not as inexpensive as I had hoped.

Looks like Intel has the cheapest P67 boards (on newegg at the moment, anyway) at $115 for the DP67DE (microATX) and $117 for the DP67BA (ATX). All Intel P67 and H67 boards have UEFI. The only difference between the DP67DE and DP67BA is that the DE has only one PCI slot while the BA has three.

To the OP: a review of Intel's P67 motherboards said about the on-board sound that "the integrated audio can't encode multi-channel bitstreams or virtualize surround-sound speakers."

Under $115 is H67 territory (integrated video, no ability to overclock K series CPUs).

EDIT: The DP67DE has a PCI-E 2.0 slot, not a 1.x slot as I posted earlier.
Click to expand...

I would have been shocked if that were a mere 1.x slot, as even G41 supports PCIe 2.1 natively, let alone X58.
 
evilsofa said:
The ASUS P8P67-M is now up at newegg for $130, not as inexpensive as I had hoped.

Looks like Intel has the cheapest P67 boards (on newegg at the moment, anyway) at $115 for the DP67DE (microATX) and $117 for the DP67BA (ATX). All Intel P67 and H67 boards have UEFI. The only difference between the DP67DE and DP67BA is that the DE has only one PCI slot while the BA has three.

To the OP: a review of Intel's P67 motherboards said about the on-board sound that "the integrated audio can't encode multi-channel bitstreams or virtualize surround-sound speakers."

Under $115 is H67 territory (integrated video, no ability to overclock K series CPUs).

EDIT: The DP67DE has a PCI-E 2.0 slot, not a 1.x slot as I posted earlier.
Click to expand...

Unless you already have a K-series CPU, good luck getting one without getting raped. (MC doesn't have any Ks in stock, and when they do get any, they tend to disappear rather quickly.) And even integrated video is no real penalty, as it certainly wasn't with G4x/G5x (the problem with G5x was no quad-cores for that socket), as H55 still supports discrete (most support CrossFire, with some, such as the ASUS P8H67 EVO, supporting SLI as well, despite the microATX form-factor).

The bigger issue is that *some* H55 motherboards are as DIMM-starved as their earlier G5x and G4x ancestors - ASUS' P8H67 PRO is an example of a DIMM-starved H67, as it has just two DDR3 DIMM slots (half that of the EVO) and lacks the EVO's SLI and QuadCrossFireX support as well, but only costs $20 less. (I've bought two consecutive motherboards with paltry 4 GB RAM ceilings - dumb move on MY part; I can't blame anyone else for that, and refuse to make THAT error again.)

Unless you have a K, or know you'll be getting one, you can get an H67-based motherboard and not really be *settling*.
 
Koslov said:
How well can you OC the 2500K with the Intel DP67BA motherboard??
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Unknown so far. All the early adopter overclockers seem to be ignoring the Intel boards.

I am getting the DP67DE this week, and that is a very similar board to the DP67BA; from the pictures (DP67BA and DP67DE), it appears the only difference is that the BA has two more PCI slots, and doesn't do anything else with the extra board length besides those slots.
 
I just picked up the ASUS P8P67 and the Intel i5 2500K (unlocked) for $300 combined at Micro Center (more advanced versions of the P8P67 can be swapped into the combo for a price boost, but I am not running dual monitors or anything like that). Fry's is having similar deals surrounding the i5 2500K, but I didn't keep the flyer.

The i5 2500K has the same power rating as the i5 760, but is 3.3 GHz instead of 2.8.

The P8P67 has 1 x16 video slot, 4 DIMM slots, 4 USB 3.0 ports (2 rear and 2 inside), 4 SATA3 ports and 4 SATA2 ports (only the SATA2 supports RAID), plus DTS sound.


Jeff
 
DarthV said:
I'm thinking about the asrock p67 extreme4. Bonuses for being able to use lga775 coolers and comes with a usb 3.0 mounting bracket that internally mounts a 2.5" drive.
Click to expand...

I went with the asrock extreme4 for cost and partly because it claims to be compatible with lga775 coolers. I have a xigmatek s1283 (basically lga775 only version of the dark knight) and it was most definitely not compatible. The holes were in the proper place but the bracket for the heatsink was angled in such a way that it pressed against the cpu socket and I could only get 3 of the 4 push pins in. I had to buy the 1156 adapter kit to get it to work, which had brackets that were at a right angle as opposed to the sloped ones for the lga775 version (which sloped right into the socket).

That said, it seems like a solid board so far and I'm overall happy with it.
 
With the latest bios I could find for the DP67BA board (November 2010), I havn't managed any decent overclocking. I have tried increasing the turbo multipliers across the board, but the CPU throttles back down to 3.3ghz really quickly, and now have disabled turbo mode, disabled power savings, and set the base multiplier to 40, yet in windows it only goes up to 3.3 under load and still switches down to 1.6 when idle. Also the changes I make show up in the wrong column in the bios, the bios shows current, proposed/user defined, and default, and all changes I do seem to modify the default settings and not the user defined. :( Might be fixed with a bios update tho... I have a K CPU and bumping up turbo multipliers to 40 lets it go up to 40 for a few seconds....
 
Suicidal Insanity said:
With the latest bios I could find for the DP67BA board (November 2010), I havn't managed any decent overclocking. I have tried increasing the turbo multipliers across the board, but the CPU throttles back down to 3.3ghz really quickly, and now have disabled turbo mode, disabled power savings, and set the base multiplier to 40, yet in windows it only goes up to 3.3 under load and still switches down to 1.6 when idle. Also the changes I make show up in the wrong column in the bios, the bios shows current, proposed/user defined, and default, and all changes I do seem to modify the default settings and not the user defined. :( Might be fixed with a bios update tho... I have a K CPU and bumping up turbo multipliers to 40 lets it go up to 40 for a few seconds....
Click to expand...

Since there's no reviews of the BA or DE, and my DE doesn't arrive until tomorrow, I've been looking at overclocking reviews of the BG, including these:
Techreport was able to overclock to 45x
(A site that hardocp refuses to link to) was able to overclock to 41x but I'm not sure I understand what they were doing
funkykit was only able to go up to 38x
bjorn3d able to get up to 48x with default voltages but the page is a confused mess with gigabyte and asus board info mixed in

I feel like there's some misunderstandings going on about how to overclock the Intel boards.
 
I might be just doing something wrong, if you have better luck let me know. I now have base back down to 33 and turbo multipliers @ 41, just noticed the realtemp update linked here which works with i7, I'll do a quick prime run and upload a log.
I assumed the overclocking features would be similar to the BG, since the power layout was the same and the BG model just included more SATA ports, PCIe slots, etc which I will not need.

E: RealTemp log: http://pastebin.com/cquRmegn (Running prime95 on 4 threads for a couple of mins)

E2: I just massively bumped the sustained turbo mode thermal limit, and that resulted in the CPU running @ 4.1 for 2 minutes, then dropping down to 3.3, instead of fluctuating between 3.7 and 4.1 before dropping down. I wish I knew what caused turbo mode to disable itself :(
 
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I got my DP67DE up to 42x on stock voltages with no throttling back when running IntelBurnTest. I did some different things than you did, I think. See my Intel mobo thread.

The DP67DE and DP67BA are so similar that they even use the same BIOS.
 
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