Intel P67 Roundup - The Mainstream Invasion

BIOS Settings & Test Setup

BIOS Settings

You should know by now that there is very little allowance when it comes to overclocking the base clock frequency on the P67 chipset. This clock frequency is the central 'clock' for the entire board, so despite the fact that the BIOS settings on some boards allow users to tweak by a huge amount, even the best cooling will not be able to get that frequency working. The answer is to get a 'K' processor if you intend to do any sort of serious overclocking on the new Intel P67 platform. Then, it's just a matter of pushing the multipliers and getting the right voltages to support that.

While overclocking, users can adjust the following voltages on the six P67 boards in order to ensure a higher, or more stable overclock. 

Test Setup

Our test configuration was mostly similar to what we used in our Sandy Bridge review. The main difference was the use of a less powerful graphics card, the GeForce 9800 GTX instead of a GeForce GTX 260. The drivers however have been updated and Windows 7 Ultimate was the operating system.

• Intel Core i7-2600K @3.4GHz
• 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1333 (CAS 7-7-7-20), *MSI P67A-GD65 was running at 8-8-8-24
• NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX (ForceWare 260.99)
• WD Caviar Black 1TB, SATA 6G (Intel 6G)
• Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit)
• Intel INF 9.2.0.1015

The following benchmarks were used:

• BAPco SYSmark 2007 (version 1.05)
• Futuremark PCMark Vantage (1.0.3.1)
• Futuremark 3DMark Vantage (1.0.3.1)
• SpecView Perf 9.0
• Far Cry 2