You can’t compare the numbers from one with those collected with the other.if one considers “removing” the non powered esata ports on the ud4 to shave $57 off the price…would that paint a different picture of which board is recommended?Although it lacks a third PCI Express x16 slot, the Gigabyte board’s slot stack had plenty of expansion capacity. This provides great graphics performance. Asus carries over the same overall layout it uses on standard motherboard BIOSes, so there’s no need to relearn where everything is. With our VelociRaptor hard drive, the P67’s 6Gbps SATA ports are simply faster than those stemming from the Marvell controllers. Intel has dealt with the P55’s most glaring weakness by providing full-speed PCI Express lanes throughout. Note, too, that the Intel and MSI models don’t have nearly as many power phases as what’s being offered by Asus and Gigabyte. There’s no support for multi-channel encoding in real time, though.Before moving on, note that the GD65’s VRM heatsinks give the socket area plenty of space. Once again, the P67 Express enjoys a commanding lead. Unfortunately, they leave little room around the bottom screw hole in the picture above. In a surprising twist, the other guys are following its aesthetic lead.All but the MSI board have been available in Switzerland since the 20th of December 2010. I doubt the high voltage is a requirement of the board, but rather MSI’s tendency to be a bit over the top with voltages on their profiles.Question: since the P67 needs a discrete GPU, does that mean that you can never use Quicksync on the Sandy Bridge IGP for encoding?As is, a P8P67 PRO with 4x4GB DDR3 and an i5-2500K or i7-2600K is mighty tempting…A massive but low-profile chipset heatsink leaves plenty of room for longer graphics cards to stretch out. You can only increase the Turbo peak by 400MHz with standard models, but the multiplier is completely unlocked with K-series chips that carry only a modest price premium over their partially unlocked counterparts. The P67 has a second-gen DMI implementation that doubles the speed of each lane, bumping aggregate interconnect bandwidth up to 4GB/s.Gone are the days when motherboard makers were seemingly in competition to see who could strap more metal to the voltage regulation circuitry on their motherboards. Let’s move on.Incidentally, we used the latest BIOS and AMD AHCI drivers with the 890GX board. Some buttons require a double click when only a single tap should be necessary, and the back button doesn’t work consistently.Fortunately, Gigabyte appears to be heeding our calls for more robust fan speed options—sort of. Instead, you’ll have to manipulate individual Turbo multipliers for one-, two-, three-, and four-core loads. At least MSI doesn’t give up ground in the overclocking and tweaking departments. The omission is understandable. While those are better results, they’re still a ways behind the native implementations offered by the other chipsets. That’s what PCI Express is for. Manually overclocking on all of these boards allowed for much lower voltages to achieve even higher clock settings. Even the P55 is quicker there. The fact that the Intel board gets away with six-phase power gives us little reason to think that the GD65 will be at a serious disadvantage.As long as the South Bridge does not bottle neck the drive then it’s good enough for me.