H67 – A Triumvirate of Tantalizing Technology
by Ian Cutress on March 27, 2011 6:25 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Sandy Bridge
- H67
Overview
ASRock’s H67 lineup consists of 6 boards, ranging from $100 to $140, in both micro-ATX and mini-ITX form. The H67M-GE/HT comes in at $120, and even comes with a USB 3.0 Front Panel with space for an SSD in there. After a blast with the board, I can safely say ASRock were aiming for the midrange.
Of note, the ASRock board falls down on the single thread benchmarks compared to the P67. On further inspection, it seems that in single threaded mode, the full 4x turbo was not being applied, but rather a 3x turbo was in place. It did hit the 4x turbo on occasion, for a minuscule amount of time here and there, but due to the 3x turbo implementation, the ASRock board falls behind. I emailed ASRock about this, and they responded that this is how the H67 is meant to work, which leads to the conclusion that, if the other H67 boards behave similarly, there are more stringent rules on what constitutes a single thread process on the H67 chipset from Intel themselves.
Visual Inspection
Typically, when I see a blue and white motherboard, I think Gigabyte. However, with Gigabyte moving towards a black livery on their high end boards, it leaves another company to barge in on the space – enter ASRock. Maybe blue and white ports are cheaper to produce or something.
One of the first things to notice about this H67 board compared to any others are the small VRM coolers. The board offers a 4+2 digital VRM setup, four fan headers (three three-pin, one four-pin), and standard mounting holes for your 1155/1156 CPU coolers. There are also mounting holes for socket 775 coolers, making that old cooler last even longer. There is enough space to mount a number of large air coolers, or your favorite all-in-one water cooler.
The low profile chipset cooler is used, so as not to interfere with large PCIe x16 cards. With a dual-slot PCIe x16 card, there is still access to a PCIe x1 and PCI slot; however I would have preferred one of the PCIe x1 slots above the PCIe x16. There are five SATA ports on board – two SATA 6 Gb/s (white) and three SATA 3 GB/s (blue). The SATA ports are sticking out of the board, contrary to what we have seen with the P67 boards so far – they are also facing each other, potentially making wiring more difficult if all 5 ports are being used.
We were not expecting debug LED and power/reset buttons on this $120 board, and true to form, none are provided. However, as you will see on the ECS board which comes in at $145 later in this combination review, they do come in on some H67 products. In our P67 reviews thus far however, the cheap ASRock P67 board had the debug LED and power/reset buttons and the more expensive ASUS/Gigabyte boards did not. This time, we are not so lucky. But with H67, maybe we do not need them. We will look into this later.
In terms of legacy connectors, we still have the floppy connector here, and the PS/2 port on the back panel. Onboard ports come in the form of 3 USB 2.0 headers, one USB 3.0 header, and an extra firewire port.
The back panel is not exactly brimming with connectivity, but we are looking at four USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, gigabit Ethernet, eSATA, audio, and quad display outputs – DisplayPort, HDMI, DVI-D and D-Sub.
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MrSpadge - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 - link
Well done, Gigabyte! And it's a shame how poorly the others are doing in comparison. I fI wanted high power consumption I could just stick with an old machine or get an AMD..Not wanting to start a bashing / flame war. It's just that in my eyes the exceptional power consumption (especially idle) of the Sandy Bridge + IGP (plus excellent performance) is what makes it really attractive for really many roles.
MrS
trogthefirst - Thursday, March 31, 2011 - link
Actually i was torn between H67/61 and one of those 785G/880G platforms for my aunt recently - non gaming build In the end she needed multi display scalable to possibly 3-4 displays so i went with a cheapo 880G and an $70ish AthlonII X3 With the Surround View feature you could run, with a Radeon GPU up to 4 displays (2 from integrated graphics) and 2 off something like a passively cooled HD 4350/5450 Sounds like a lot of expansion, features, etc for such a cheap platform if u ask me!loimlo - Thursday, March 31, 2011 - link
Dear IanWould you like to share us with Power cumsumption measurement detail?
1. Is it DC or AC draws?
2. How do you measure the watts? From the wall plug by using Kill-a-watt?
3. Did you give not so useful MB's energy-efficiency software like ASRock IES, Gigabyte Energy Saver?
That said, I never had good experience with these softwares, especially Gigabyte one.
ShadowVlican - Thursday, April 7, 2011 - link
did you guys measure total system power consumption, or is that just motherboard? looking to build a HTPC, would love something modern and doesn't eat powertpk911 - Wednesday, April 20, 2011 - link
Intel to release Z68 chipsets in first half of MayMonica Chen, Taipei; Steve Shen, DIGITIMES [Wednesday 20 April 2011]
http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20110419PD212.html
Intel will release its Z68 chipsets in the first half of May, with Gigabyte Technology likely to be the first major motherboard maker to launch Z68-based products as soon as its embargo expires. Gigabyte's offerings will include its top-end GA-Z68X-UD7-B3 model.
Motherboard makers have also reportedly been informed that Intel will focus more on its Z- and H-series chipsets.
The share of P67-series motherboards will begin dropping once the Z68 is launched and the segment will gradually be phased out, with the P-series not being included in Intel's next generation chipsets.
...just a quick update, if I may :)
gsuburban - Sunday, February 12, 2012 - link
I wanted to upgrade from an Asus P5 series board and found most of the P8 boards had no floppy or ide (pata) interface on them. Since I still have 2 great BenQ 1655 DVD recorders, they wouldn't be usable without buying a PCI PATA card. After looking matters over I didn't see much benefit in using up 2 of 6 SATA ports since I have at least 4 hard drives and would be limited on SATA ports etc.I thought it over and discovered the P8H67-V and P8H67-M Pro by Asus still had the ide interface on board. No floppy but at least the IDE was there which would yield 6 SATA ports available without using them for the DVD-Optical.
I use XP Pro still since it does have it's advantages in some areas and not having the floppy drive is the pits as you can't load AHCI drivers via the F6 prompt in setup. I tried all sorts of ideas such as a custom image that included the AHCI drivers etc without success.
The P67 boards are totally fine and they run fast with the right CPU and memory but they are best used with Windows 7. The H67 boards save you about $250 since you don't need a video card, the boards are less than the P67's and with the select models, you get an IDE port which also frees up 2 SATA ports for those who still have IDE devices.
H67 would be my choice for high performance every day computing since the graphics are much improved from the days of G series and price is low, around $105.
I think it's too soon to eliminate the floppy and IDE interface at any rate.