ASUS Sabertooth P67 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). The manufacturer added two additional SATA-600 ports, controlled by a Marvell 88SE9120 chip, with no RAID support. The SATA ports are located on the motherboard edge rotated 90°, so video cards won’t block them.

Figure 5: SATA-300 ports (black), SATA-600 ports controlled by the chipset (brown), and SATA-600 ports controlled by the Marvell chip (light gray)

Additionally, there are two eSATA-300 ports on the motherboard rear panel, 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.

There is no support for a floppy disk drive controller or an ATA-133 port.

This motherboard has 12 USB 2.0 ports, six soldered on the rear panel and six available through three headers located on the motherboard. It also has four USB 3.0 ports, two available on the motherboard rear panel and two available through a front panel connector, controlled by two NEC (Renesas) µPD720200 chips.

This motherboard has two FireWire ports, one soldered on the rear panel and one available through a header on the motherboard. These ports are controlled by a VIA VT6308P chip.

This motherboard supports 7.1+2 audio format, i.e., eight channels plus two independent channels for audio streaming. On this motherboard, the audio is generated by the chipset using a Realtek ALC892 codec. Finally, Realtek is disclosing the specifications of this chip, which include a 97 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the analog outputs, a 90 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the analog inputs, and up to 192 kHz sampling rate for both inputs and outputs. These specs are good for the mainstream user, but if you are looking into working professionally with audio editing, you should look for a motherboard that provides an SNR of at least 97 dB for the analog input.

The portrayed motherboard comes with independent analog audio outputs, meaning that you won’t need to use the line in or mic in jacks when connecting an eight-channel analog speaker set, and an optical SPDIF output. You also can add a coaxial SPDIF output or route digital audio to your video card to have digital audio in its HDMI connector using the available “SPDIF_OUT” header.

This motherboard has one Gigabit Ethernet port, controlled by the chipset, using an Intel WG82579V chip to make the interface
with the physical layer.

In Figure 6, you can see the motherboard rear panel, with a shared PS/2 mouse and keyboard connector, six USB 2.0 ports, two eSATA-300 ports, optical SPDIF output, one FireWire port, one Gigabit Ethernet port, two USB 3.0 ports (blue ones), and independent analog 7.1 audio outputs.

Figure 6: Motherboard rear panel