SPCR

I picked up the P8P67 Pro yesterday as part of my upgrade to Sandy Bridge. Along with it, I picked up a 2600k cpu, 16G of Corsair XMS3 ddr3-1333, Thermalright MUX-120, and an Asus EN210 video card. As a preface, I'm running Ubuntu on this system.

The P8P67 Pro has a lot of features I don't need. I don't game, so the 3 PCIE x16 slots don't do me any good. Call me silly, but the main reason I got this over one of the less expensive boards is that this one has Intel gigabit ethernet, where the rest have Realtek. I also tend to have devices that charge from USB, so having a bazilion USB ports doesn't hurt (right now I appear to have a total of *14* USB ports, including a pair of USB3). Built-in bluetooth is neat, no more super low profile $3 dongle from dealextreme.

Initial impressions are very good. The mounting hardware for the MUX-120 is a tight fit but it fits.The memory slots have enough space between them to actually fill all 4 slots when your memory has a heatsink on it, which was a big improvement over my last system.

I took my time on the installation, this was an upgrade so I'm reusing my Antec P150 case, antec earthwatts 430w psu, a pair of 2tb WD Green drives, and 500g Seagate Momentus hybrid drive. My last system was a q6600, assembled 4 years ago, with some pretense of playing 3D games that never actually happened.

Once I got it assembled, I went straight to the BIOS. Kind of neat, you can use your mouse, and its pretty. They actually have descriptions of the different options now. The bios version was older than the one marked "Initial Release" on asus.com, so I used their in-bios update feature and installed the update from a USB stick. (Thanks for finally taking DOS out of the mix!)

I booted all the way to my OS, all hardware came up as expected, including my dual-screen setup as my previous card was also Nvidia. I did update my kernel to a packaged 2.6.38-020638rc2-generic to make sure I had the most complete support for this new hardware possible.

Couple of hiccups, though.

. lm_sensors doesn't recognize anything by default. `modprobe coretemp` gets CPU tempeatures, I've seen mention of workarounds to get other sensors, fan speeds, and voltages, but at this point I haven't gotten that far.

. If you overclock, I have not yet found a way to measure your actual CPU speed. Normally it would show up in /proc/cpuinfo, and for the SpeedStep speeds it still does. However, when you go above the stock multiplier, it shows stock speed+1mhz, in my case 3401. This makes it quite difficult to test your overclock as you can't be sure what speed you're running at.

. I'm not sure why, but every Intel board I've used in the last 5 years has Virtualization disabled by default. This includes servers, and it includes this Asus board.

. I need better fan speed control. The bios has a fan profile selection, and choosing their Silent profile doesn't quite get you there. The SYS1 fan won't go below 1100rpm, and the cpu fan won't go below 900. This is way more airflow than necessary at idle temps (cores reporting 28c at 1600mhz right now), and it jumps up a step amazingly quickly (about 1 second after starting stress -c 10), although it never jumps a second time, temperatures settle at a reported 65c. I will experiment with other methods of fan control as th fans quickly become the loudest thing in the system.

All in all I call this a success. I upgraded all my virtual machines to 2 cpus and 2G ram. A few more tweaks and it will get a gold star.

What kind of fans are those? What is the heat sink?

ces wrote:What is the heat sink?

He already said, ces, it's a Thermalright MUX-120 (somewhat similar to the COGAGE True Spirit reviewed by SPCR, I guess). Today it's available with the black nickel coating.

However, mr. Lee, why haven't you reviewed (as maybe usual on SPCR) the compatibility with SpeedFan? Is there any real issue?

Just a little typo at the very last sentence of page 5:
"So even if you overclock to gain performance, there is no extra power penality at idle." --> penalty


I don't know when you started this review but there was a new BIOS released on the 27th, it supposedly reduces boot time.
There's also a new version of AI Suite though it doesn't seem to fix that fan control issue.

Thanks for the review, Lawrence!

Note: Page 4 OCZ RAM link is bad.

<edit> Also, Speedfan 4.43 beta 10 is out with additional/fixed Sandybridge support.

squash wrote:If you overclock, I have not yet found a way to measure your actual CPU speed. Normally it would show up in /proc/cpuinfo, and for the SpeedStep speeds it still does. However, when you go above the stock multiplier, it shows stock speed+1mhz, in my case 3401. This makes it quite difficult to test your overclock as you can't be sure what speed you're running at.

On linux (which I assume you are running) there is a utility called turbostat for nehalem/SB class processors. It returns data captured at runtime over an arbitrary interval indicating how much time each core spent in what power/frequency state. It also returns the real turbo frequency each core is running when in turbo mode.

It is part of a package called pmtools or something like that. Make sure you get the latest version of turbostat because older ones don't support SB.

Edit: Here is what turbostat's output looks like on mine (turbo multiplier set to 40x on each core in BIOS). I am running 4 threads of Prime95 to stress test my OC and you can see it shows 100% in the c0 power state (turbo state on Nehalem/SB). Next to that it shows the frequency in GHz of the turbo state. It will keep averaging results over a few seconds and printing the results to console:
Edit 2: In Linux, make sure you enable all the intel-related features in the kernel. You want to enable frequency scaling and set the default governor to ondemand. In my experience, the userspace governor will not enable the turbo frequencies even under 100% load and you will be stuck at stock!

Exactly what I needed. Now I can accurately determine my best overclock and monitor current speeds!

My current settings were just a stab in the dark, with this tool I can determine my best overclock. Running 'stress -c 10':
core CPU %c0 GHz TSC %c1 %c3 %c6 %c7 %pc2 %pc3 %pc6 %pc7
100.00 4.43 3.50 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
0 0 100.00 4.43 3.50 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
0 4 100.00 4.43 3.50 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
1 1 100.00 4.43 3.50 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
1 5 100.00 4.43 3.50 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
2 2 100.00 4.43 3.50 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
2 6 100.00 4.43 3.50 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
3 3 100.00 4.43 3.50 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
3 7 100.00 4.43 3.50 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00

I'm staring at the photo on page 2, and I feel like I see two 4-pin fan headers (top left and top center) and two 3-pin fan headers (top right and bottom right). Am I wrong? Which of of the three non-CPU headers can be controlled?

It seems strange that one of the two controllable case fan headers would have a PWM pin and the other would not. Do my eyes deceive me?

andymcca wrote:I'm staring at the photo on page 2, and I feel like I see two 4-pin fan headers (top left and top center) and two 3-pin fan headers (top right and bottom right). Am I wrong? Which of of the three non-CPU headers can be controlled?

It seems strange that one of the two controllable case fan headers would have a PWM pin and the other would not. Do my eyes deceive me?

Yes, there is one 4-pin chassi fan, and one 3-pin. Both can be controlled by voltage (which CPU however cannot, weirdly enough).

Is it true you can't control the "Power Fan" speeds? I'm looking at the BIOS screenshots from this review (http://www.clunk.org.uk/reviews/asus-p8 ... ge-11.html) and apparently you can only use Q-Fan for the CPU and Chassis fans. I was thinking of getting an ASUS P67 motherboard and connecting my Nexus 92mm 3-pin fans to the "Power Fan" headers, but this is somewhat discouraging...

Hi, re the fan control, it sounds very like my, now aging, P5B-E Plus.
The CPU fan is 4pin, PWM control only.
The "case fan" headers (3pin 3 of, ??? on the P8P67) are voltage control, they are all on one control, ie all run the same voltage.
The "power fan" (above the CPU fan) has no control, full 12v output, but can be monitored.

Works very well for me, controlled by Speedfan.
The PSU controls it's own fan and the sense wire is routed out the PSU to the power header to monitor the fan speed.
I use a 4 pin PWM fan on CPU and this is controlled on the CPU header, and works as you'd expect, minimum reliable fan speed is ~18% / 500rpm. (will vary with fan)
Of the 3 case fan headers two are routed to 3 (80mm) case fans, speed controlled without issue right down to stopped, if desired.
Final case header has graphics card fan speed plugged in to it.
(in fact one of 2 fans on the video card, both controlled by the card, the other fan's speed is fed back to the card. Up shot is one gfx fan in Speedfan and other in GPU-Z! The graphics card (GTX260) monitoring seems to be much finer grained and more sensitive.)

Hope this helps, Seb