BIOS and Performance
BIOS
As with the rest of the P8P67 series, the LE variant ships with Asus’ new EFI BIOS Utility. This smart graphical interface replaces the standard BIOS found on all boards for the past decade, and allows you luxuries including full colour menus, mouse support and a more expansive array of options. The BIOS initially shows its EZ Mode, a simple menu allowing novice users to select their boot device and choose between performance and power saving. The meat of the action happens inside the advanced menu, however, and anyone who has used an Asus BIOS for the past few generations will still feel immediately at home, as the ordering and layout of the EFI borrows heavily from previous BIOS interfaces.
The bulk of the interesting options are housed within the AI Tweaker menu, where you have access to the board’s array of overclocking options. We will cover these in more detail in the overclocking section. In the Advanced menu you’ll find the SATA configuration utility where you can turn on AHCI or the board’s RAID modes, as well as the options to tweak or disable the on-board features. In the Monitor section you can check your CPU and motherboard temperatures as well as enable Q-Fan control for both the CPU and chassis fans. It’s nice to see this noise reduction feature on an entry level board, as previous generations of LE boards were not always equipped with this feature.
The Boot menu allows you to change your boot device priority while the Tools menu houses three very useful utilities. Asus EZ flash allows you to update your board’s BIOS using a pen drive, Asus SPD Information shows you the default memory settings as defined by your modules while the Asus OC Profile allows you to save a number of different BIOS configurations.
Performance
To test the performance of the board we loaded up Sysmark, PC Mark Vantage, Cinebench and our AutoGK video encoding benchmark. Rather than show you pages of pointless graphs, we’ll tell you the predictable outcome. The P8P67 LE performs pretty much identically to the rest of the P8P67 range, the Deluxe and the Sabertooth included. This puts it just behind MSI’s boards like the P67A-GD65 but moderately ahead of Gigabyte’s offerings. All of the results were within a per cent or two so you are not going to get statistically-significant performance differences by choosing one manufacturer over another.
|
