Introduction

I'm not sure why, but I'm a huge fan of the tiny mITX form factor. It's come a long way from the days of VIA powered boards and while they indeed were cool, they just didn't have the performance you could get out of mATX or larger boards which could carry those faster Intel and AMD CPUs.

The format has really blown up lately, though, and we're seeing more and more companies offer mITX boards based on chipsets that indeed offer the chance to give us some real performance. Today we're looking at the ASUS P8H67-I which as you can possibly tell from the name, is based on the H67 chipset.

It's not the most high end chipset on the market, but what it does allow is for us to use those higher end 1155 processors like the 2600k. The other big appeal is that it uses a proper x16 PCIe slot which means that higher end video cards like the GTX 580 we use shouldn't be hindered even though the board is smaller.

Anyway, we'll find out what's going on with the board and its performance in a moment, but first we'll check out the package. Once that's done we'll take a closer look at the board before getting into the BIOS side of things. Then it's time to get into the testbed and see just what kind of performance we're able to get out of the P8H67-I.

Firstly, let's find out if good things do indeed come in small packages.

The Package

With the board being so small, the box itself is of course quite small. You can see this one uses the newer B3 revision which means that the initial SATA port problem isn't going to be present.

As for the bundle, there's not a lot going on with a user guide, quick start guide, driver CD, two SATA cables and a back I/O plate. It's a pretty small bundle, but it doesn't come as a surprise considering the board we're dealing with.