---

The Board

The board follows the traditional coloring of ASUS Socket 1155 architecture. Shades of a blue/grey and white on a mostly black PCB. Instead of the blue wave designed heat sinks we saw on the P8P67 Deluxe a low profile one piece black heat sink handles cooling the VRMS and the PCH all in one shot. Phases are split up with only 3 (+1+1) for the CPU. With the remaining phase used for the SO-DIMM power.

As this is designed to be a small form factor product, special attention needs to be paid to the size of the heatsink used on the CPU. The P8H67-I packs a lot of features into a tiny space. Something has to go and that is the ability to use many oversized coolers. The H67 chipset does not support overclocking and with a 2500K even in a poorly ventilated ITX case, the stock heatsink worked well enough to keep the CPU well within manageable temps.

At the top of the IO area we see the mounts for the two wireless antennas. Before mounting check the tightness of the nuts on the IO area. The top nut was loose making attaching the antenna difficult. Even after tightening the nut by hand, the next attempt to mount the antenna the nut was loose again. A drop of Loctite would surely solve that issue.

A PS2 port is included for those still using old keyboards as well as those using high end Mechanicals. Considering the market niche this board is aimed at, 2 more USB ports would probably have been a more logical choice. Below the PS2 ports we have the first 2 USB 2.0 slots colored in black.

HDMI, DVI, VGA are powered by the Intel IGP and processed by the Asmedia HDMI chip located directly behind the HDMI port. TOSLINK SPDIF (Optical digital Audio port) is located above the HDMI port.

Next we have in red, an ESATA port of 3GBps variety provided by the PCH67. Two more USB 2.0 ports and a light indicator for the Bluetooth Wireless 3.0.

Ethernet is provided by Realtek like the audio and uses the 8111E chip that is located directly behind it. Below this are the 2 back panel USB 3.0 ports (in Blue) provided by one of two Reneasas D720200F1 controller chips. The second chip is located near the 19pin internal header located near the top of the board.

Lastly we have 3 analog audio ports. The IC for this is the Realtek 892 and is located … yes behind the ports. Between the Realtek ICs is located the Front panel audio header, and a 3pin SPDIF out header right against the PCIE slot.

The PCIE Slot takes up nearly the whole bottom length of the board, but some labeling gets fit in underneath it and the ASUS EPU chip is located directly above it. One thing missing, no ASMedia PCIE muxers! only one PCIE slot is included on the board and it gets the whole 16 lanes directly from the CPU.

The front bottom corner of the board contains the Clear CMOS jumper, no button on this board as it should never be needed anyway, the Green “SB_PWR” LED in front of it lets us known the board is live. Above this is the front panel connections. Writing on the board helps place the correct wires on the right pins.

Above this and in front of the 204pin SO-DIMM slots, are some more ASUS features. Memok! is a one button “auto tuning” for memory to help the system boot when incompatible SPD tables are detected by default. The MEM LED is located right next to this and indicates boot success or failure for the memory as well.

A switch for auto clocking the Integrated GPU is placed here, useful for those with ITX benching stations. Another sight that might be strange for users of larger form factor motherboards, is the CMOS battery. IT is mounted vertically which is common on SFF builds to preserve PCB real estate.

Near the top of the board sits the 24-pin power socket. Behind which is placed mini PCIE slot housing the Atheros wireless and Bluetooth card. Just above this is the 19pin USB 3.0 internal header, provided by the 2nd Renesas chip just past the mPCIE. The 4 SATA ports are color coded for easy recognition, blue for SATA 3Gbps and white/grey for SATA 6Gbps. The top port is counter mounted (180 degrees opposite the next port) which could be an issue with removing the DATA cable in certain configurations. Being on the board edge, getting a finger in to the cable latch once it is case mounted might be difficult.

Just inside the SATA ports is a black “debug port” that looks like an inverted USB 2.0 header. The BIOS chip is here as well consisting of a 32Mb flash ROM. The ICS timing device is located between the SATA port and the BIOS ROM.

At the top back of the board directly behind the IO area we have the rest of the headers and connectors. 2 FAN connectors 4 pin for CPU 3 pin for case fan. A blue USB 2.0 front panel header and the blue 4pin CPU power port. With the heatsink removed we see the VRMs clearly, and the PCH67 socket as well.

Removing the heatsink there are only a few small contact points due to the limited number of phases on the board. No indentations were noted in the thermal pads implying poor contact universally. As always that horrible pink bubble gum is used for thermal interface between the PCH and the heatsink.

 

Power conditioning overall is delivered by Apaq Solid caps a Taiwanese based solid cap company that has been pushing for the Japanese capacitor business over the last few years. They specialize in Solid caps for low power devices like smart phones and tablets and are moving over 100 million units a year.

The Apaq as with many other Alum solid caps are rated at 105c for 2,000 hours, just like a liquid electrolyte cap. The difference is where a liquid based cap doubles its lifespan for every 10 degrees cooler it runs, a solid cap increases by an order of magnitude every 20C cooler. So at 65C the lifespan is expected to be about 200,000 hours or 22 years. To play it safe run a fan in your HTPC until your newborn leaves for college.

The back of the board is populated with more analog power conditioning circuits, including MOS controllers and linear regulators.

The 3 screws that hold on the heatsink are visible here as well as the Nuvoton LPCIO The “Super I/O” NCT6776F. This Chip supports a wide number of legacy function from floppy disk, serial and Parallel support as well as more modern Environmental controller, LED support, Port 80 diagnostic functions, cIR for remote controls as well as both Interrupt and polling mode for keyboards. A full break down can be read here.

 

Next: UEFI and Software

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7