ASUS P8P67 Deluxe Motherboard

On-Board Peripherals

The Intel P67 chipset is a single-chip solution, and is also known as PCH (Platform Controller Hub). This chip supports two SATA-600 ports and four SATA-300 ports, supporting RAID (0, 1, 5 and 10). ASUS added two additional SATA-600 ports, controlled by a Marvel 88SE9128 chip (RAID 0 and 1). All SATA ports are located on the motherboard edge, rotated 90°, so video cards won’t block them.

ASUS hit bull’s eye by using different colors for helping users identifying which SATA-600 ports are controlled by the chipset (light gray) and which are controlled by the add-on chip (dark blue).

Figure 6: SATA-300 (light blue) and SATA-600 (light gray and dark blue) ports

Additionally, the manufacturer added two eSATA-300 ports, controlled by a JMicron JMB362 chip. One of them (the red one) is a regular eSATA port, but the other (the green one) is a “power eSATA” port, which has extra pins for power. It is interesting to note that on motherboards from other manufacturers, especially MSI, the power eSATA port is also a USB port, which doesn’t happen with the power eSATA port included with the P8P67 Deluxe.  

This motherboard doesn’t come with ATA-133 or floppy disk ports.

This motherboard has 12 USB 2.0 ports, eight soldered on the rear panel and four available though two headers located on the motherboard. It also has four USB 3.0 ports controlled by two NEC μPD720200 chips, two soldered on the rear panel of the motherboard and two available thru a header on the motherboard. The portrayed motherboard comes with an adapter for you to install these ports on an external 3.5” bay from your case.

Figure 7: USB 3.0 adapter

There are two FireWire (IEEE1394) ports, one soldered on the motherboard rear panel and one available through one header. Th
ey are controlled by a VIA VT6315N chip.

The P8P67 comes with eight-channel audio, generated by the chipset using a Realtek ALC889 codec, which provides profissional-level audio quality: 24-bit resolution, up to 192 KHz sampling rate for both the inputs and outputs, 104 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the inputs and 108 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the outputs. This means that you can use the motherboard integrated audio to professionally work transferring and editing analog audio to the digital format (e.g., converting LPs to CDs, VHS tapes to the digital format, etc) that you won’t hear background noise.

The portrayed motherboard comes with on-board optical and coaxial SPDIF connectors, and you can either route digital audio to your video card to have digital audio in the HDMI connector using the available “SPDIF_OUT” header.

The analog audio jacks are completely independent, so you won’t “kill” the mic in or the line in jack when installing a set of 7.1 analog speakers.

The portrayed motherboard has two Gigabit Ethernet ports, one controlled by a Realtek RTL8111E chip and the other controlled by an Intel 82579V chip.

The P8P67 Deluxe comes with an integrated BlueTooth 2.1 + EDR interface.

In Figure 8, you can see the motherboard rear panel, with shared PS/2 keyboard and mouse connector, eight USB 2.0 ports, coaxial and optical SPDIF outputs, BlueTooth antenna and controller, two eSATA-300 ports (the green one is a power eSATA port), one FireWire (IEEE1394) port, two USB 3.0 ports (blue ones), two Gigabit Ethernet ports, clear CMOS button, and independent analog 7.1 audio outputs.

Figure 8: Motherboard rear panel